Can organized skepticism do a more spectacular face-plant?

Jebus. Michael Shermer has just proudly announced that the next issue of Skeptic magazine will be dedicated to his fellow member of the Intellectual Dork Web, Jordan B. Peterson.

David Gorski has been scathing. I agree with him.

Whatever it is Shermer is peddling, it ain’t skepticism. It’s closer to cult-like dogma.

There was a time, in the ancient of days, when skeptical magazines would take a Cuisinart to the kind of incoherent babbling woo that Peterson spins. Now they dedicate whole issues to praising him.

Bwahahaha!

Evil Cat and I are made for each other, I guess. She follows me all over the house, and during the day, she lurks in my office glaring at me. She likes to lounge about on the carpet, like so:

But here’s the amusing part: she has those curved needle-like claws, like fish-hooks at the ends of her paws, and even though she must monitor me, that carpet snags her claws fiercely. She sometimes sits there, staring me down, and starts flexing those claws, in a hostile, intimidating way.

I wait for that and then leap out of my chair and stride purposefully from the room, as if I have something important to do, like opening a can of tuna, and she tries to follow, but she’s hooked — and then there follows lots of yowling and thrashing about as she tries to get free. Sometimes she rolls herself right up in the carpet with her struggles.

And I laugh, evilly.

See? We’re a pair.

The November elections will be…interesting

I took a look at the Minnesota primary election results. There weren’t really any surprises, although there was one disappointment.

The disappointment is that Tim Walz will be the DFL candidate running for governor in November. I despise Tim Walz — he’s a conservative Democrat who has been in the pocket of the NRA for years. What’s particularly galling about it is that I keep seeing people saying that they voted for Walz because he was most appealing to outstate (the obnoxious term people in the Twin Cities use for the region outside the Twin Cities) voters, so they were supporting the DFL candidate most likely to win over those Neandertals who don’t reside in the metropolitan region.

I live in “outstate” Minnesota. Grrrr. Don’t assume we’re all gun-totin’ rednecks out here.

The one bit of good news was the election turnout — record numbers all around. Most importantly, there were 600,000 DFL voters and 300,000 Republican voters. You’ve got to wonder how any Republicans ever get elected.

(Rhetorical question: it’s because of criminal levels of gerrymandering, and because in most elections voter apathy is high.)

The plague is spreading!

Who will be the next prime minister of Australia? Fraser Anning or Bob Katter? Anning made an open call to Australian racists, and as we Americans can tell you, that’s politically potent.

Fraser Anning, from the conservative Katter’s Australian Party, called for migration bans on Muslims and others in his maiden Senate speech on Tuesday.

Political opponents denounced his speech as “disgraceful”. Mr Anning said he did not need to apologise.

“Final solution” was a term infamously used by the Nazis during the Holocaust.

In his speech, Mr Anning said “the final solution to the immigration problem is a popular vote”.

On Wednesday, lawmakers across the political divide moved to pass parliamentary motions censuring Mr Anning for his “racist hate speech”, noting in particular his use of the phrase “final solution”, and his “false, misleading and hurtful statements” about Muslim Australians and other immigrant groups.

The Australians, I’m sure, are torn between indignation and amusement that these two flaming nutters and their party have even a remote chance of taking over the government, but we were laughing at Trump ten years ago, too.

The disease is spreading. I know the racism has been there all along, but the plague in this case is that so many awful people now feel emboldened to preach it openly.

Can a feminist or a woman be guilty of sexual harassment?

How about a feminist woman? They certainly can. All it seems to take is a power differential and sexual desire, and in the absence of restraint, along comes another case of sexual harassment. Read about the case of Avital Ronell, a famous feminist scholar, who took advantage of her position to be rather, umm, forward with her student, Nimrod Reitman. It’s all documented in embarrassing emails.

It’s all about hierarchies and power, so of course a woman can be guilty of harassment.

Reitman says he put up with this behavior because Ronell had power over him as his adviser, Greenberg reports. He also says that when he did complain to Ronell about her harassment, she retaliated by sabotaging his job prospects. Graduate students can be especially vulnerable to harassment by their advisers, who often wield enormous control over the direction of their careers.

What’s also shocking is how many other well-known feminists leapt to Ronell’s defense. It’s a serious problem when justice is strongly skewed by differences in power.

We clearly need to foster more irreverence in our culture.

The movie this week is…The Equalizer

No, not this one.

We are very pleased to now have a two screen theater here in Morris — it means that first-run movies don’t clog up the sole screen for weeks and weeks, so we’ll get a more regular roll-over of movies. Most importantly, it means that that horrible Mission Impossible crap has already been shunted off to the mini-theater, and we get a brand new shiny horrible piece of crap already.

This week, we get The Equalizer 2. I have fond memories of the old TV series from the late 1980s, in which Robert McCall, played by Edward Woodward with a bit of class, would take on the problems that the police wouldn’t — and there’d be some twisty little plot where he’d use his vast sums of money, his network of talented characters, his mysterious background as a spy, and a clever scheme to cunningly give the bad guys their comeuppance. My wife was particularly fond of the show, probably because the protagonist was a handsome distinguished older gentleman with a nice English accent.

This movie is a little different.

In this one, Robert McCall, played by Denzel Washington, uses his mysterious background as a spy to track down the bad guys and brutally, bloodily murder them to death with his bare hands, or sometimes a wicked little knife. The movie opens with an irrelevant side plot in Turkey, in which McCall slaughters four big bruisers in a train car, and then we go off to Belgium, where a woman is being murdered in front of her husband, and then her husband’s brains getting blown out, and it kind of takes off from there — bones are broken, faces are punched, women are brutalized (but they fight back ferociously…I don’t think that makes it OK), bombs go off, a guy gets shot in the face with a harpoon gun, another guy gets his guts blown out with a cleverly made bomb in a bakery, one more guy gets slashed multiple times and bleeds to death slowly, and another one gets a similar slashing, but he gets off easy because he then falls from a great height and goes splat on some rocks. Lots of blood. Lots of nasty sound effects. Not quite what I expected. The talented Melissa Leo is totally wasted in her role, but I was surprised to see the ancient Orson Bean is still alive and played a significant part in the movie. He wasn’t any good at it, but it was impressive that someone who was in TV and the movies in the 1950s is still kicking.

Fortunately, I’d invited my wife to join me, but she begged off because she had better things to do. I don’t think she would have liked it at all.

Oh, hey, I think I had better things to do, too. I don’t know what, but just about anything would do. I could have eaten spiders for two hours, I’d probably feel less queasy.

I wonder what the Catholic League has to say about the Catholic pedophile ring in Pennsylvania?

Here we go again. As announced by Pennsylvania State Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a grand jury has released a report on the child-raping pedophiles employed by the Catholic church as priests.

The nearly 1,400-page report’s introduction makes clear that few criminal cases may result from the massive investigation.

“As a consequence of the coverup, almost every instance of abuse we found is too old to be prosecuted,” it reads.

“We subpoenaed, and reviewed, half a million pages of internal diocesan documents. They contained credible allegations against over three hundred predator priests. Over one thousand child victims were identifiable, from the church’s own records. We believe that the real number — of children whose records were lost, or who were afraid ever to come forward — is in the thousands.”

Some details and names that might reveal the clergy listed have been redacted from the report. Legal challenges by clergy delayed the report’s release, after some said it is a violation of their constitutional rights. Shapiro said they will work to remove every redaction.

It’s indefensible, but then…the actions of the Catholic church have always been repellent and indefensible, but they just keep on keepin’ on. So I got to wondering what that ardent and reactionary defender of the Holy Mother Church, Bill Donohue, had to say. Easy: it’s a conspiracy.

So if no one can be prosecuted, and there is no investigation of the clergy from other religions, to say nothing of the widespread sexual abuse of minors in the public schools, why is Shapiro presiding over the grand jury report on priests? It’s not exactly hard to figure out: he wants to stick it to the Catholic Church.

The goal is obvious: the release of the most graphic accounts of molestation is being done to embarrass the Church. Why? So it will weaken its moral authority. That is what Salacious Shapiro wants to do.

Donohue has two excuses. The first is that other religions are doing it, and they’re getting away with it, so why pick on the Catholic church? I think most of us learned by kindergarten that somebody else doing a bad thing doesn’t mean you get to do it, too. This part is basically an admission that there are child-rapers in the Catholic clergy, it’s just that it’s unfair to only pick on Catholics.

But then his second excuse is that releasing stories of child molestation weakens the moral authority of the Church. I hate to tell you this, Bill, but it’s not the public exposure of moral corruption with the church that discredits it, it’s the acts of corruption themselves that do that.

I also don’t think the report is intended to stick it to the Catholic Church. There’s a simpler motivation. The Attorney General would like priests to stop raping children, for the Catholic Church to stop enabling them, and for the Church to stop its criminal efforts to hide the facts of heinous crimes.

You know you’re a Republican when…

You fall for a Sacha Baron Cohen stunt.

The guy is a gun nut named Dan Roberts, and is considering suing Baron Cohen for tricking him into doing something humiliating.

If I were in such a situation, I’d be arguing with the guy and refusing to go along, and I think that might be the difference. It’s not whether you’re conservative or stupid, it’s about how willing one is to submit to authority.