What we have here is a shocking failure of imagination

The poor man. Jimmy Flores came down with a serious case of COVID-19: life-threatening symptoms, hospitalized, breathing tube, the works. He’s getting better now, fortunately, but he was mystified about how he got into this state.

“I would never have imagined in a million years that I would get this virus the way that I did,” becoming so sick about a week after, Flores said.

Before his collapse, he had chosen to attend the reopening of a bar in Scottsdale — a packed bar with 300-500 people.

Totally mystifying.

Someone noticed Pinker’s sleaziness

There’s a petition making the rounds to have Steven Pinker’s recognition by the Linguistic Society of America removed. I don’t expect a petition to accomplish much of anything, but this one is nicely written.

As we demonstrate below, Dr. Pinker’s behavior is systematically at odds with the LSA’s recently issued statement on racial justice, which argues that “listening to and respecting [the experience of students of color] is crucial, as is acknowledging and addressing rather than overlooking or denying the role of the discipline of linguistics in the reproduction of racism.” Instead, Dr. Pinker has a history of speaking over genuine grievances and downplaying injustices, frequently by misrepresenting facts, and at the exact moments when Black and Brown people are mobilizing against systemic racism and for crucial changes.

Though no doubt related, we set aside questions of Dr. Pinker’s tendency to move in the proximity of what The Guardian called a revival of “scientific racism”, his public support for David Brooks (who has been argued to be a proponent of “gender essentialism”), his expert testimonial in favor of Jeffrey Epstein (which Dr. Pinker now regrets), or his dubious past stances on rape and feminism. Nor are we concerned with Dr. Pinker’s academic contributions as a linguist, psychologist and cognitive scientist. Instead, we aim to show here Dr. Pinker as a public figure has a pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them.

It then proceeds to document instances where Pinker played fast and loose with the facts to advance his dogma of progress constantly marching forward, as long as we ignore the inconsequential suffering of poor minorities. It’ll be ignored, but maybe a few people will wake up to his dishonest messaging.

The presidential campaign will be about…statues?

So, how are you celebrating the Fourth of July? I’m not. It’s just another day when idiots will crank up the jingo and make me embarrassed to be an American, so I don’t have any reason to party — quite the contrary, I plan to duck down low and hope the whole shameful episode goes away soon.

The president, on the other hand, took the opportunity yesterday to amplify his disgrace with a partisan demonization of his critics.

“The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society,” Trump said. “It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”

The president, who recently signed an executive order aimed at punishing those who destroy monuments on federal property, referred to “violent mayhem” in the streets, even though many of the mass demonstrations have been largely peaceful. He warned that “angry mobs” were unleashing “a wave of violent crime” and using “cancel culture” as a weapon to intimidate and dominate political opponents — in what he compared to “totalitarianism.”

And Trump asserted that “children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe the men and women who built it were not heroes but villains.”

“This radical view of American history is a web of lies,” he added.

“They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive,” Trump said. “But no, the American people are strong and proud, and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history and culture to be taken from them.”

To demonstrate totalitarianism, Trump also had Indian protesters, who have long protested the seizure of their land to build a ‘patriotic’ monument to American colonialism, sculpted by a racist, arrested. Message received.

We’re living in interesting times, when we face the ongoing threats of a pandemic and climate change, when the police have been rampaging against the citizenry, when naked racism is exposing itself everywhere, when the government is a nest of corruption and incompetence. One might wonder what our president might do to address these issues, rather than inflame them. Don’t worry. He has a Plan. A cunning plan, no less, one that we’ll hear much more about as he runs for re-election.

In an effort to fight back, he announced a surprise executive order establishing “The National Garden of American Heroes”, a vast outdoor park featuring statues of “the greatest Americans to ever live” – a selection sure to provoke debate and controversy.

You see, the real problem is that statues are under threat, and we have to provide a refuge from oppression for a huge gallery of random collections of statues. Someone threatens to tear down a statue of slaver and traitor Robert E. Lee? Send in a helicopter and whisk it away to some acreage full of other statues of people no one should like. A retirement home for representations of dead people of dubious character, if you will, sprinkled with a few monuments to people like Ulysses Grant and Harriet Tubman to give the shameful dead some respectability.

That’s a Trumpian solution, all right, celebrating the problem and making it worse, creating a centralized repository of bad art and bad history which he can have patrolled by armed guards who will shoot and/or arrest people who dare to protest his celebration of freedom. He also desperately wants to make this nonsense a campaign issue, because for sure he won’t be running on his record or his abilities.

Well now, isn’t that a depressing article

In the Washington Post: Coronavirus autopsies: A story of 38 brains, 87 lungs and 42 hearts, just the thing to read if you want to know how COVID-19 will kill you. To summarize it unjustly, it’s thousands of microclots in your lungs. But that’s not all! There are cardiac, brain, and kidney effects as well, only those don’t seem to be direct actions of the virus. Instead, it’s more tiny vascular damages, like hundreds of microstrokes in the brain. Good to know, when you’re lying there comatose with a respirator down your throat, that you’re being nibbled to death by lots of tiny clots destroying your organs.

Yet people now are not even taking minimal precautions, claiming a mask infringes on their liberties, as if a virus ripping up delicate membranes in their body doesn’t.

Hey, who all is gettin’ together with their buds for beer and loud music and fireworks this weekend? It may be your last chance before your lungs are perforated and your brain gets swiss-cheesed, so enjoy yourselves!

Confessions of a has-been atheist

I gave up on creationist debates when I realized I was being taken advantage of — I’ve always been willing to do these engagements as an opportunity for science communication, so I wouldn’t charge anything except for travel expenses. Then I did one event where, after getting there, I learned that there was a banquet planned for their honored creationist speaker, to which I was not invited. Then I discovered that he was put up in a suite in the big hotel in town, but I was told that surely I’d be able to find a motel somewhere nearby. That’s the kind of respect you get from creationists.

Atheists aren’t much better.

Would you believe I still get tentative invitations to speak at atheist conferences? (For the past 6 months, those have all been online events, of course.) I hardly believe it myself, since I consider myself persona non grata in atheist circles, but apparently some people have good memories of events I’ve done in the past, and they call or email me. “Hey, we’re in the planning stages SuperAtheistCon, and your name has been suggested as a potential speaker. Are you interested?” And I’d say, sure, if I’m free that day. They’d ask for the usual headshot and bio, and sometimes they’d ask for an abstract for the talk, and sometimes they’d even ask for a complete outline of my topic, which was usually something science-related. I’d provide what they’d ask for, and let it lie. Then, usually, silence. I’d never hear from them again.

I’d just figure, “wow, my idea must have been really boring,” which may well have been the case, and that’s OK.

A few times, I’d get a regretful call back. They decided not to go with me, after all, because one of their board members objected that I was a feminist or an SJW (unspoken: the rest of the board went along with what they thought was a legitimate complaint), and also they landed some Hitchens-loving islamophobic misogynist speaker who was more popular than me, and now they’re out of money. Fair call.

One event even got to the point where I had all the slides done for a talk when they pulled the plug. It’s sinking in that I’m not ever going to speak at an atheist conference ever again, and that atheist conferences have achieved a kind of uniformly vaguely right-wing ambience that means they don’t want me, and that I don’t want them.

That’s all fine, I do not expect to be given a platform. However, please stop pestering me with tentative requests that you and I both know will get squelched by the dominant right-wingers in your organization, especially if that request is accompanied by a demand that I do the work of providing a justification for myself. It’s getting old and really hardening me in my cynicism.

P.S. I have zero sympathy for those professional atheists who whine about getting stiffed by conference organizers like Pangburn Philosophy. Sorry, guys, I’ve always done it for the cause and not for the money, so your petty bourgeois demands leave me cold. You’re doing it for the cash, and you got robbed by capitalist parasites, but still you defend the status quo? Boo hoo.

P.P.S. Maybe another reason I get disinvited from conferences is that they know I might sneer at their headliners.

On this day 157 years ago

I don’t know that my Minnesota ancestors fought in the Civil War, but the Iowa side of the family did, in the Western campaigns under Grant. I’ve been in this state for 20 years, my mother and grandparents were born here, so it’s fair that I take a little pride in the bravery of the 1st Minnesota.

No Minnesotan should ever flaunt the Confederate flag.

The “Home of the People Lovers” is going to kill us

I just had to make a harrowing trip to our local grocery store — harrowing, because no one wears face masks around here, I’ve seen one employee routinely wear one, and as I run my errands I see old people, middle-aged people, young people milling about, often stopping for annoying chit-chat with Ole and Lena in the aisles. I swear, when the pandemic comes swirling back into this county, the central locus for infection will be this store…and the churches. This community simply does not take the threat seriously. Except for the bubble of the university, this is also a county that went for Trump, by the way.

The headline on the Minneapolis Star Tribune right now is “Walz might mandate face masks”. Might. This is madness. The entire country was pretending that the pandemic was over, opening businesses, encouraging everyone to get out and shop and drink and celebrate, when nothing had changed, and now that the numbers are starting to rise again, there is this dull, dim glimmering that gosh, maybe we ought to do something to prevent the spread of disease. They’re going to be dilatory about it all, of course.

It’s not just Texas and Florida. We’ve got these indecisive, dishonest weasels working behind the scenes up here in Minnesota, too.

And goddamn, Willie’s SuperValu, get your act together. You’ve got a “coronavirus alert” link on your web page that hasn’t been updated since early April, and you haven’t taken a single responsible action to limit the spread of disease in your store, other than raising your prices.

I’ll be coming for your neutrons, Brian

I’ve got an infrared thermometer, and I’m not afraid to use it.

Brian should be terrified.

Should we explain to him that:

  • I think he meant “neurons”, not “neutrons”. Neither are destroyed by an infrared thermometer.
  • While many infrared thermometers have a laser to identify the spot being measured, it’s low intensity and doesn’t penetrate the skin. Or the bones of the cranium. Or the brain, or “brian”.
  • They work by measuring the infrared radiation emitted by your skin. Not by zapping you.

So this is the quality of the opposition to basic health care measures? We’re doomed.

By the way, I have one for measuring the approximate temperature of spiders. I couldn’t find a regular thermometer tiny enough to shove up their bottoms. (Also, they’re not particularly accurate — I’m primarily measuring the approximate temperature of their environment.)

Jeffrey Epstein’s procurer has been arrested

Finally, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s enabler/associate/partner in crime, has been arrested. Now it might get interesting — Epstein may be dead, but Maxwell knew as much if not more about his activities and all the people who took advantage of their ‘hospitality’. I wonder if she’ll spill the beans, or if she’ll conveniently decide to commit ‘suicide’? There may be some members of the European and American aristocracy sweating right now.