I usually skip this event at Skepticon, the Skeptiprom. I’m kind of a wallflower, and I don’t dance, but this year, I have a reason to go.
It was a good day. I did my usual spiderwalk, and found that the outside of the federal building (yes, I got stopped by the police again) was populated with these furrowed orb weavers everywhere. I caught a few, they were impressive.
Epstein apparently successfully committed suicide.
This is not justice. Right now, a lot of sick, rich fucks around the world are heaving a sigh of relief.
If you’re not here, you can still listen to the first two talks of the con from Friday night. Highly recommended!
Ashton Woods was a fierce and passionate for social justice, and a great example of the heart of this meeting. Rose Eveleth was smart and funny and made everyone think.
It was only the first day and it reminded me why I’ve been attending this meeting for 11 years. (OK, maybe not why I went the first year or two, they didn’t always have great speakers…but now they’ve settled into an exceptional groove.)
This is how some Christians think they’ll win hearts and minds for their religion. It’s pretty much typical for what I wake up to every morning.
There’s a phrase these fanatics like to use: “hardening the heart against God”. I’ve been dealing with this stuff for decades, and they’ve succeeded in turning my heart into a gristley, fibrous lump of black contempt for religion. Thanks, gang, I wouldn’t be the atheist I am today without you!
I would also remind my fellow atheists now that reversing this tactic against them will not persuade them that your intellectual rejection of the supernatural premises of religion is valid, either.
The guy who invented PCR has died. That’s an absolutely, utterly essential innovation that revolutionized molecular biology, but strangely, his death has gotten virtually no press. That link takes you to a newspaper that highlights the fact that he graduated from a local high school.
I guess that’s what happens when you make an important discovery, but spend the rest of your life in a drugged out haze, emerging now and then to defend astrology, or promote climate change denialism, or claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. It all just confirms that your discovery was a fortunate fluke.
I’m away from my wife this weekend, but she knows what important things are happening in Morris and is keeping me up to date on the essential news.
The swarm of caterpillars that have been gnawing on the milkweed she planted are pupating all over the house!
Now you know, too.
This is how you do it.
Last week when the Dropkick Murphys played Termianl 5 for two nights, things were going according to plan. It was St Patty’s Day week, the shows were packed, and people were getting drunk. And rowdy. Really rowdy. As has become tradition the band invited the ladies to come onto the stage for their encore of “Kiss Me I’m Shitfaced” 50+ ladies made it past the barricade and onto the stage and danced the song away. The band then kicked into “Skinhead on the MBTA” and a ton of dudes were getting past security and the stage ended up being packed tighter than the underside of a real man’s kilt. As the band kicked into T.N.T. by AC/DC some moron started seig heiling (the nazi salute) in time to the beat.
Dropkicks singer / bassist Ken Casey noticed this and ran right over to the guy, smashed him in the face, took off his bass and hit him with that and then jumped on him and all out chaos ensued. We could only assume from our vantage point that said nazi got his ass kicked. About 30 seconds later Ken emerged from the pileup with his shirt torn and made his way back to the front of the stage. He strapped on his bass and said into the microphone “Nazis are NOT FUCKING WELCOME at a Dropkick Murphys show.”
Yes! Before the usual pearl-clutching centrists start whimpering about free speech and violence, I’ll just point out that kicking the ass of some vicious maniac who supports genocide and mass deportations and racism is a perfect example of an appropriate, tempered reaction.
I am so relieved. If they didn’t, this trip to Skepticon would have been a total waste of time.
I knew there would be, of course. Although, I took a stroll around the hotel, and it was a wasteland — it looked like the exterior had been hosed down recently, and even the few cobwebs I found were sad tattered shreds. Then I discovered the federal building behind us, and man, the windows there are dense with webs. I saw big ol’ orb weavers hanging out in massive webs that covered an entire picture window pane, and lots of my little pals, Parasteatoda, lurking in the corners. I caught a few, like the male above, that I’ll take home to start a Missouri colony. I’ll go back later and get some more.
One downside is that if you’re hanging about a federal building with a big camera with a long lens, and you keep peering at windows, I guess you look a bit suspicious. A policeman stopped by to ask, “Uh, what are you doing?” I told him, and he watched as I scooped up one in a vial, so I think he believed me. Also, it helps to look like an old white nerd (it shouldn’t, but it does. I also don’t have a Russian accent.)
Oh, and hey, the Skepticon conference starts this afternoon — the young people who organize it apparently don’t believe in getting up before 11am, so you’ve got plenty of time to get down here. Sure, go ahead, you’ve got time to look for spiders before the events start up.
Quillette published an article titled “DSA is Doomed”, written by someone named Archie Carter who claimed to have attended meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America and found them pointless, riven by dissent, full of hipsters, and counterproductive. This was exactly what Quillette wanted to hear, and they fast-tracked it for publication.
One problem: the author lived in Illinois, had never attended a New York meeting, and was making it all up.
“Tell them I live in the area of [Jacobin managing editor] Micah Uetricht,” said the playful voice on the other line. Carter — this twenty-four-year-old Illinoian’s pseudonym — had reason to be happy. He had successfully baited Quillette — the self-described “platform for free thought,” though more widely known as a platform for phrenology — with a “little Sokal experiment.”
That little aside is a good snipe, but I must correct them. They are best known as a platform for craniometry, not phrenology, although both are equally bogus.
What’s most amazing, though, is not that someone got a fake article published in a magazine, but that the original copy wasn’t juicy enough for Quillette, as disparaging as it was, so the editors of that rag jazzed it up a bit, adding new details that they invented to the story.
Comparing the original draft Carter had written (verified through a Google Doc link included in his email correspondence with Quillette), it’s clear that the publication made an extra effort to add embellishing details to the story — separate from Carter’s original fabrication — in order to advance a right-wing narrative of DSA as hopeless, dithering, anti-working class snowflakes.
For example, it was Quillette, not Carter, that included the line, “My union friends were horrified. While these people spend hours reproaching themselves and each other, real people in America are suffering.”
Quillette also suggested that DSA meetings “would drag on forever in order to accommodate the neuroses of the participants and to ensure that the proceedings observed the norms of ‘inclusivity.’”
Wow. The article has been taken down now that it was revealed that it was a hoax, but it’s revealing that not only were they soundly trolled, but they assisted in amplifying their own trolling.
Quillette is just the worst.
I’m in St Louis for Skepticon, and I am disappointed. The rooms at this hotel are huge and clean — too clean — the shower is like a pressure washer, and the location is amazing, right off the Metrolink line*, so I got here from the airport for just a few bucks, walked up to the street level, and there was the hotel, right there, and it was probably the easiest access to a conference venue ever. However…
There are no spiders anywhere in this gigantic suite. I went around with a magnifying glass to verify. It’s sterile. So I’ve donned my spider hunting gear, and am about to embark on an exploration trip to a) find some breakfast, and b) survey the environs for spiders. I have collecting vials and am not afraid to use them.
Hey, if you’re in the neighborhood, come on down! The conference is free, it’s held in the Red Lion Inn right next to the Civic Center rail stop, and it’s up on the 13th floor.
*Oh, incidentally, about the Metrolink — it’s a nice rail line direct between city center and the airport, and when I got on, I was the only white guy on the train, which is not an issue, except that at one of the stops another white guy got on, looked over the occupants, and charged over to sit next to me, like the train wasn’t half empty anyway. Not a problem, of course, except that he was staggeringly drunk, and he wanted to talk about religion with me.
Why me? Do I look like a Lutheran pastor or something?
Anyway, the conversation didn’t go far. He was so drunk he could barely talk, and he chose to lecture me on the Trinity. You know, the Father, his Son, and…Jesus’s sister? I had to just ignore him, although the bait was awfully tempting.
