The latest big dickhead to be exposed is…

…Tony Robbins! Tell me you’re surprised. He’s another over-inflated ass with no real talent or expertise beyond self-promotion, he maintains a secretive self-help empire, he’s a creepy cult leader, and he practically oozes privilege and greed. Of course he’d be full of himself and his bad opinions, and he’d expect his underlings to serve him in every way possible.

One woman had told him through tears that she had been raped. Robbins recounted how he had “cut her off” in a “warm” and “elegant” way and informed her that she was “fucking using all this stuff to try and control men.”

Every man who silences a woman who has been raped believes that they did it elegantly, I’m sure. Especially when they go on to blame the victim.

Don’t worry, he doesn’t support rape, he just thinks it unimportant.

“I don’t support anybody fucking raping her or taking advantage of her,” he said, according to the transcript, “but I don’t support her fucking manipulating herself, men, and other people by trying to use that tool when it’s really not the primary experience of her life now.”

Of course, he has a theory. He has no academic training or expertise at all — he does have a high school diploma, at least, but nothing beyond that — but he paints himself as a psychological authority.

By now, Robbins had set himself up as an authority on relationships, dispensing a theory about “two opposing energies — masculine and feminine.”

“Women’s torment is that men fucking look, and men’s torment is that women are fucking insane,” he said at the same 2003 event.

He’s made billions of dollars off that kind of bullshit. It’s about time someone took him down a few thousand notches.

The Buster Keaton Ballet

I don’t know how I can enjoy a movie where someone is shot in the head at close range every minute, but so help me, I do find the John Wick movies fun. I don’t know if it’s something wrong with me or with America, but they’re so over the top bonkers, while Keanu Reeves is so earnest, that you can’t take the murder sprees seriously. It also helps that it’s a fantasy world where there are avaricious assassins lurking everywhere, so when one of them leaps out at you with kung-fu or a big sword or a nasty looking gun, it’s perfectly excusable to shoot them in the head. What else could you do? Style points for executing them elegantly and brutally.

The movie is also self-conscious. I didn’t come up with the comparison in my title, the movie overtly references both Buster Keaton and ballet at several points. It combines the slapstick physicality of Keaton with the grace of a dance, although neither of those influences usually culminate in bloody violence. There is a kind of inevitability to the story, too. You know that when Reeves finds himself in a shop selling exotic knives, he will be breaking open every cabinet and throwing and stabbing and slashing with all of them. When he has a fight in a ritzy high end hotel with glass statuary lining the place, someone is going to get thrown into each and every one of them. It’s a thematic obligation, and it’s strangely satisfying when expectations are fulfilled.

John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum was predictably unpredictable, fun, and horrific, a nightmare where everything turns out OK. It also beautifully sets up John Wick: Chapter 4, so now I’m going to have to go see that as soon as it comes out.

How did he persist?

I am just shocked at the stories emerging about David Yesner, the University of Alaska anthropologist. He is being sued for sexual harassment by 20 women, for events spread over 26 years.

The women allege that Yesner subjected them to years of sexual discrimination, harassment, abuse, exploitation and retaliation that was crippling to both their academic careers and their emotional well-being and that the university failed to comply with federal Title IX requirements in response to their numerous complaints.

They describe Yesner as someone who would deliberately stare at their breasts, make inappropriate sexual comments and advances and find ways to touch them without consent. He was known to keep an extensive pornography collection on his computer that was discovered by multiple women on different occasions during his time at UAA. He also kept photos he had taken of students participating in field digs, cropped to highlight body parts rather than archeological artifacts. One woman reported walking into his office to find him masturbating.

In one of the most serious claims against Yesner, a woman who spoke to Title IX investigators reported that Yesner sexually assaulted her in a public shower during a field project.

There’s something rotten at the University of Alaska. They’re suing Yesner, the whole dang university, and the regents of the university — they reported the problems many times, and the Title IX office dragged its heels, the chancellor did nothing and was in fact about to bestow emeritus status on Yesner. There seems to be a real problem among the faculty there.

Jane Doe I and Jane Doe II “constantly” reported Yesner’s behavior to professors and other faculty, according to the suit, but were met with excuses like “Oh, that’s just David being David.”

Jane Doe II was also told she “should cover up more” and that she should just “switch advisors” – a move that would have set her studies back by years since she was already writing her thesis under Yesner’s guidance.

The lawsuit alleges Yesner retaliated against Jane Doe I for rejecting his sexual advances by delaying grading her comprehensive exam, which prevented her from graduating. The task should have taken the professor five weeks at the most, according to the suit, but instead it took 2 1/2 years. She eventually withdrew from the university, but still must pay back student loans with interest.

“David being David.” Jesus. Try mentally reviewing your colleagues and coworkers, and you probably know their personalities and quirks well enough that you can say that’s “[Name] being [Name]” about something — it’s about the emptiest thing you can say — but it can also numb you to what harm they’re doing. “Oh, that’s just Joe, he likes holding up liquor stores on the weekend. That’s Joe being Joe!” Usually, when we’re told about criminal behavior, we don’t excuse it by dismissing at just a feature of their nature.

Unless, it seems, it’s sexual harassment. Boys will be boys, you know; if we kicked out all the men who fondled young women and made lewd jokes about them and held up their progress in the system, why, we wouldn’t have a department any more. As one of Yesner’s accusers put it, though:

“Because the university ignored a longstanding problem, my dream of becoming a professional archaeologist came to an end. All of the hard work I put into my chosen path leading up to graduate school was subverted by Yesner and UAA when I had to quit. Yesner made it clear to me I would never finish my degree. Every student should have the opportunity to work hard and succeed, not work hard and have their professional confidence debased. Every student should be able to trust the institution they attend.”

Exactly right. When Yesner started his petty tyranny over two decades ago, he should have been fired then. I understand precisely the pressures universities face, where dismissing a faculty member means the administration is going to take years to replace them, and meanwhile, everyone else has to work harder to fill the gap because he was also teaching essential courses and doing the administrative work, but the procedures should have been initiated long ago, not the year he is retiring. Sure, if you kick out the harassers you’re going to weaken your department for a while, but what will thoroughly destroy your department and blight the careers of your students is if you keep him there.

Would anyone recommend to an enthusiastic student who wanted to study anthropology that UAA would be a good place to go? I wouldn’t. I’d steer them to just about any other university. Yesner may be gone, but the faculty who said, “Oh, that’s just David being David” is presumably still there. The chancellor still has his job. The Title IX office is still understaffed and not doing its job.

Labor!

I am not used to this. I’m cleaning up the garage today, and it is a cluttered mess. My wife pointed out to me that there might be spiders in the debris, so of course I’m out there poking about and moving heavy objects and looking under old boards. I’ll probably be all worn out and sore tomorrow.

Tomorrow, by the way, is the UMM Commencement ceremony. I’ve got my strange medieval robes and funny hat all ready to go, and it’s going to be streamed live, so if you’re incredibly bored, you can watch me sweltering in the faculty stands somewhere in there.

Ugh. I just finished the major cleanup. I swept everything, turned over every box and mystery pile, went through it all with my acutely tuned eye for spiders…NOTHING. Not a one. I know they’re hiding somewhere in there, they’re just avoiding me.

I can’t believe Biden is the front-runner

A former writer for The Onion regrets the gentleness of their satirizing of Uncle Joe. Isn’t just the fact that “Uncle Joe” has become one of his nicknames telling enough?

I can’t speak for my colleagues, but at the time, I didn’t take him seriously enough to think we were doing anything wrong. I thought of him as little more than a political necessity: the older, more conservative white guy who softened Barack Obama’s image in regions where the prospect of a black president was too radical. A deeper dive on Biden never felt necessary.

I’ve since changed my mind. Today, Biden is the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, despite women calling him out for touching them in ways that made them uncomfortable at public events, and despite objections from the left wing of the party. He has said he has “no empathy” for the problems millennials are experiencing and claimed that Republicans will embrace bipartisanship after Trump is defeated. As I watch him campaign as an old (-fashioned, -school, -old) centrist, I realize how badly we screwed up. Instead of viciously skewering a public figure who deserved scrutiny, we let him off easy. The joke was funny, but it didn’t hit hard enough.

A Biden nomination by the Democratic Party would be another out-of-touch catastrophe. He generates no enthusiasm, except by comfortable older white people who like the fact that he’s not going to change a goddamn thing — smug confidence in the status quo might make him the Democratic nominee, but I don’t see him winning when all he can instill is apathy, and he’s going to be an easy target. Trump is going to claim that Biden is in the pockets of the bankers (not that Trump isn’t), that we can all see that patronizing women is fine and nice, that he’s the Establishment that the populists want to bring down.

If he does win, all we get is a right-of-center centrist who will waltz before congress thinking his affability gives him an edge, and the Republicans will just say “NO” and eat him alive. He’s the lose-lose candidate.

I’m just hoping he’ll commit some terrible gaffe and go down in flames before he’s the nominee, and I expect he’ll oblige. He usually does. Right now, though, the media seems to be anointing him as the right and electable candidate, so he might get the kind of pass no other Democrat would receive.

None of us are better than this

When an Alabamian tells you to “Stop telling people that Alabama is better than this. It’s not,” you should listen. It’s a bitterly scathing op-ed.

In the past few years, when they weren’t being sent to prison for one felony or another, Alabama Republicans have attacked Hispanics, blacks, gays, blacks, transgender people, blacks, teachers, anyone who practices a religion other than Christianity and blacks.

And now, girls and women.

Their hateful bills have been ripped to shreds by federal courts and they have managed to drive away potential businesses looking to relocate to Alabama. Not to mention, the poor management of this state has deterred our best and brightest from sticking around and has driven a number of businesses out of the state.

All of that has not cost Republicans a single vote in this state. In fact, in those midterms I spoke about, the Republicans without a plan — running on nothing but hate and religion — gained seats in the Alabama Legislature.

Stop telling me we’re better than this.

We’re not.

That’s true of all of us, though. We’ve got a Trump in the presidency and corruption and unconstitutional destruction in the Senate; the Republican party is working hard to shut down democracy by suppressing the vote, and if that doesn’t work, they’re wrecking education so coming generations will be as ignorant as this one. This disaster isn’t the work of some distant nefarious evil-doer in Washington DC, it’s your neighbors and co-workers and those gomers down at the local reactionary church and your conservative uncle and your parents soaking in the warm glow of Fox News and your kids who are absorbing idiotic memes from their fellow players in video games. We’re not going to get out of this mess by electing the right figurehead. You’re going to have to pay attention to school board elections and speak up in uncomfortable social situations and canvas neighborhoods before elections and tell certain members of your family to go fuck themselves.

No more getting by, avoiding conflict, sitting quietly so you don’t make a scene. If you keep that up, it’s on you. You’re just as bad as an Alabama Republican senator, and you’re making the country worse.

Springtime for Spiders

I have been so impatient for the spiders to flourish once again, and have been keeping an eye on what looks like a hotspot for Parasteatoda egg sacs and spiderlings. Nothing there yet, but at least I get to show you the spider paradise and where I expect to see more spiders soon.

Then my wife discovered the first Theridiidae of the spring scampering across some cardboard! I caught her (I’m pretty sure it’s a her, but she’s small and juvenile), and brought her into the lab.

The new spider is named Iðunn. May she be fertile and fruitful.

People who whine about “post-modern neo-Marxism” or “Enlightenment values” generally don’t understand either

If only philosophical SWAT teams existed…although the members would probably spend more time arguing with each other than battling those prominent boobs with bad philosophical imaginations.

The commentary is good, too.

There are a large number of people who spend a good majority of their time and energy worrying about something called “postmodern neo-marxists”, while rather amazingly, not being able to name a single one, or describe what they believe. Apparently though, these mysterious postmodernists think that “everything is as true as everything else” (a position that no one has ever held), and are engaged in some kind of systematic plot to destroy Western Civilization, by using…linguistic relativism, or something? It’s kind of hard to say.

I don’t know about you, but my plots are all more chaotic than systematic.

Have you ever felt like we need atheism more than ever?

I have, all the time. I remember when atheism was about idealism and anger at ignorant tribalism and superstition. Then I remember that the atheist movement imploded because it filled up with libertarians, misogynists, islamophobes, homophobes, transphobes, xenophobes, war mongers, racists, apologists for Nazis, and generic cowards who refused to think that secularists had any duty other than denying the existence of gods, and realize that atheism would have been just as criminal as the benighted belief systems we wanted to replace.

No, you don’t want to talk to me today. The only person I want to have a conversation with is me from 20 years ago, so I can rip all of the hope out of his skull.