Ooh, such a dangerous job

The police are constantly begging for more, more, more: more money, more guns, more surplus military equipment, because, after all, killing unarmed black people in their cars is hard, dangerous work. But now they are opposing vaccine mandates because, I don’t know, it’s not macho to protect your health in the same way as wearing a bullet proof vest and carrying a big gun is? They’re kind of failing a basic risk assessment test here.

There were 245 law enforcement deaths from Covid-19 in 2020, according to ODMP.
The coronavirus has become the leading cause of death for officers despite law enforcement being among the first groups eligible to receive the vaccine at the end of 2020. The total stands at 476 Covid-19 related deaths since the start of the pandemic, compared to 94 from gunfire in the same period.

Don’t give guns to people who are too stupid to get vaccinated, please.

The cult of masculinity is just another religion

Rev. Carlson & Father Rogan

I should be used to this by now. I spent decades punching back at the weaponized stupidity of creationism: I saw it as a pathological extreme generated by narrow domains of primitive religious thought, but I also recognized it as an expression of a peculiar human property of our minds. We seek out patterns to make the world comprehensible and predictable, and we are susceptible to latching on to whatever idea gives us security, and instead of testing and challenging it, we can instead fall into the trap of selectively reinforcing whatever makes us feel better about ourselves.

My error, though, was to think too small. Get rid of religion, we get rid of a major pitfall. I still think that’s true (but very, very difficult), but I did not anticipate that humanity would simply find another dangerously deep hole to fall into right away, and that encouraging people to find another path with that “reason and logic” stuff would lead them there so fast.

I also did not expect that our doom would be maleness, the new cult same as the old cult. Yikes. I’m a member of that club. So let’s get the perspective of someone outside the club, a woman, in this case Amanda Marcotte, who I think is spot on in her analysis. The noisy mouthpieces of the far right are dominated by a group of regressive jerks who are riding to personal prosperity on the backs of the fears and inadequacy of the worst men. Tucker Carlson, for instance, is an appallingly stupid person who has found a wild niche of pandering to angry men.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti noted in her newsletter, in the past, Carlson has done segments of his show denouncing “fatherless” homes and claiming children brought up in them are “poor, uneducated and have disciplinary problems.” But now he, a father of four, is making fun of men who actually want to be present in their children’s lives. “Are fathers necessary for stable families and children, or is spending time with your kid a sign of weakness and something to be laughed at?” Valenti asks.

What this dissonance reveals, of course, is all the hand-wringing about “fatherlessness” is just a feint. After all, many divorced or separated fathers are deeply involved with their children’s lives. No, as the Proud Boys rally this weekend showed, what’s really at stake is anger at women for rejecting subservience. Single mothers, same-sex marriages, and egalitarian marriages all show that there’s nothing inevitable about male-dominated marriage. That threatens men who are attracted to the dominance fantasy of traditional marriage to silence their own nagging sense of inadequacy.

It’s not just Carlson and the Proud Boys who have figured out how to monetize male mediocrity and fragility.

Just to clarify, though, “male mediocrity and fragility” is not saying that being a man means you are intrinsically mediocre and fragile. Any group will have a subset of individuals who are mediocre and fragile, the weak links that a con artist can scoop up, organize, and turn into a force for evil. It means there is a troubling group of humans who have been recruited into a cadre with a stereotypically male flavor, who then send money to and increase the power of people like Carlson. You can find this in any group. For instance, right now we can see TERFs harvesting female mediocrity and fragility, and atheists profiting off atheist mediocrity and fragility. OK? Not all men. Not all women. Not all atheists. But there are still characteristics of those groups that can be manipulated and abused.

It’s also not just Carlson. She doesn’t mention him, but Jordan Peterson is another classic example of someone harnessing mediocrity for personal gain, and she does talk about Joe Rogan.

Podcaster Joe Rogan has made a mint off of appealing to the sea of men who want an easy boost to their self-esteem through chauvinistic chest-thumping, rather than developing real skills and a personality. Rogan can be a little more subtle than Carlson about it, but ultimately, they’re playing on the same set of anxieties and insecurities in American men, and prescribing the same toxic masculinity as a supposed cure.

In Rogan, it’s easy to see, for instance, how refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccine got encoded for the fragile masculinity set as a way to “prove” their manly bona fides. He falsely claimed that “healthy” men who are “exercising all the time” don’t need the vaccine. He repeatedly suggested that vaccine mandates were somehow an assault on freedom, rather than what they are: a common sense health measure that helps free everyone from far more miserable pandemic restrictions. Taken together, it paints a picture of vaccination as the behavior of supposedly weak men. Unsurprisingly, then, Rogan ended up with COVID-19 and had to admit that he had kept finding excuses to put off getting a vaccine he had routinely insinuated was emasculating.

Right. Turning anti-vaccination sentiments into a chest-thumping display of masculinity is the new trap. We can turn any stupidity into a virtue if we couple it to some aspect of stereotypical manliness. See also America’s gun obsession.

Once you’ve got your in-group of weak, gullible men (in this case) you have to find a target to push around. What use is your power, otherwise? So here we go. Let’s go after the transes! And the gays! And the libs!

Carlson went after a gay man with a breastfeeding joke. Rogan’s preferred target for exercising his gender anxieties is all too often trans people.

Rogan has repeatedly used his show to make fun of trans people, paint being trans as a perversity, and elevate anti-trans bigots as somehow experts on the subject. Now that comedian Dave Chappelle has joined in making being transphobic a point of pride, unsurprisingly, he and Rogan are going on tour together. The obsession with trans people isn’t just gross, it’s a little confusing. Why do these cis men care so much about the lives of trans people who have nothing to do with them?

The ugly truth is that trans people, because they’re a small and misunderstood minority, just feel like an easy punching bag for these insecure men to take their gender anxieties out on. The very existence of trans people is a reminder that gender — and therefore gender hierarchy — is a social construct, and therefore can be analyzed, criticized, and even changed. Or, as in that famous 2019 rant from a One America News Network host, transgender penguins are a threat to the “family unit” and everything conservatives hold dear.

What’s also interesting here is how easy it is to spot these self-appointed leaders dragging us down into a sewer. It used to be we could just lock in on televangelists and such, who would happily label themselves with an easy and contemptible myth, and overlook all those people who seized on other myths that we didn’t think were so contemptible (like being a man), and churned them into red meat to feed their followers. We have to get better at spotting these charlatans, and they aren’t all going to be conveniently wearing clerical collars. Some of them just sport testicles.

Hey, here’s another insecure fraud who’s making bank off male mediocrity and fragility: Steven Crowder.

Warning: that video contains what I think is the most tasteless, cruel, pointless “comedy” routine I’ve ever seen, in which Crowder and his cronies pretend to act out the George Floyd murder to show that kneeling on someone’s neck is totally harmless. That didn’t get him instantly demonetized and evicted from social media channels everywhere? That’s another part of the problem, that these fools and liars are enabled by toxic social media rules.

Why are private schools?

You know, the word “school” (and “college” and “university”) ought to have some kind of protected status, where you can’t call your institution one of them without meeting certain rigorous standards and qualifications. Get some other word for your propaganda outlet, and if you abuse the terms and mislead the people you are trying to lure into your scheme, there ought to be some kind of legal penalty. It’s not that you can’t rent a room and offer instruction to the gullible in whatever hogwash you’re peddling, but you can’t legally claim it’s a “school”.

Case in point: religious institutions that claim to be, for instance, a university, like Patriot “University”. Or private schools in general, which seem to be set ups for charging excessive tuitions and fees for information that’s better served by a true public school (goodbye, Harvard!) (OK, some private institutions have adopted good standards for education — this is a complex problem in taxonomy, I won’t pretend it’s easily solved.)

But then, there are other situations where the boundaries have clearly been crossed. Like the Centner Academy, “the brain school”. Maybe we can get them on false advertising, since there don’t seem to be any functional brains inside.

In April, a Miami private school made national headlines for barring teachers who got a coronavirus vaccine from interacting with students. Last week, the school made another startling declaration, but this time to the parents: If you vaccinate your child, they’ll have to stay home for 30 days after each shot.

The email from Centner Academy leadership, first reported by WSVN, repeated misleading and false claims that vaccinated people could pass on so-called harmful effects of the shot and have a “potential impact” on unvaccinated students and staff.

Yeah, that’s patently false. There are no viruses in the vaccine. There might be dead fragments, but nothing that can proliferate and infect.

David Centner, one of the school’s co-founders, repeated the debunked claims in a statement to The Washington Post, saying the policy is a “precautionary measure” based on “numerous anecdotal cases that have been in circulation.”

Listen to yourself, David. Do you know what “anecdote” means? You are making a policy decision based on stories and rumor — and you’re getting it all backwards! You’re blocking the people least likely to carry the disease from your “school”, and encouraging the unprotected students to attend!

The people who do attend this “school” are selected for wealth + gullibility, I guess.

Centner Academy is in Miami’s ritzy Design District, and tuition ranges from about $15,000 to nearly $30,000 per year. The school has become a haven for anti-vaccine parents because it does not require any immunizations for enrollment, citing a parent’s “freedom of choice” and falsely claiming there are “unknown risks associated with vaccinations” that could harm children.

Apparently, you go to this “school” to get a degree in ignorance and dishonesty.

A similar sentiment was shared in an email to parents last week regarding the coronavirus vaccine. School leadership referred to the shots as “experimental,” WSVN reported, and encouraged parents considering vaccinations for their child to wait several more months until the school year ends.

“We ask that you hold off until the summer when there will be time for the potential transmission or shedding onto others to decrease,” Centner Academy leaders wrote.

The school has a history of spreading inaccurate information about the vaccine and penalizing those who choose to get the shots. In April, Centner Academy employees were told they had to notify Leila and David Centner, the married co-founders of the school, if they received a vaccine. Vaccinated school employees were told they would not be allowed any contact with students “until more information is known” about the vaccines. School leaders also told those wanting the vaccine to wait until the summer to get the shots.

About a week later, a math and science teacher told students they should not hug their vaccinated parents for more than five seconds, the New York Times reported, referencing the same falsehoods the school communicated in its email about vaccine components “shedding” onto others. Some parents threatened to pull their children out of the school over the comments.

The Centners are a pair of rich kooks with egomania. Centner is a rich entrepreneur who sold code for monitoring toll booths — he has no background in education at all. They shouldn’t be allowed to pretend to be educators.

We can’t?

Rosie DiManno is wondering why we can’t say ‘woman’ anymore, which is a rather self-contradictory thing to declare in a big bold headline that got published in a major metropolitan newspaper. It’s also counter to common sense and every day experience, since I don’t seem to know anyone who is actually opposed to calling women women, except maybe TERFs, who are generally extraordinarily confused about just about everything to do with sex and gender. It’s a really simple concept, though!

Here’s the rule: you should address people by the identities they prefer and declare themselves. Rosie DiManno bills herself as a woman, and I am perfectly comfortable with addressing her as a woman. If I were to call her a man, I would either be hopelessly addled about who she is, or I’d be trying to insult her with a gendered insult, which is bad. So, hi Rosie, Woman, Human, Bipedal Vetebrate, etc. Strive to be respectful and accurate, is all.

Most/all of my interactions with Ms DiManno, if I were to have them, would be genderless, and there are only a few circumstances when I would have to call her a woman. “The boat is sinking, Ms DiManno — women and children to the lifeboats, you first,” perhaps, or “The ladies room is to the left, ma’am”. There are occasions when sex and gender are relevant, and you do not want to mix them up, lest you seem addled, insulting, etc.

Then there are the situations where some nuance is required, because the world isn’t the simple binary she thinks it is. She seems a bit incensed about a scientific article.

“The Lancet,” the prestigious and highly influential British medical journal, put “Bodies with Vaginas” on the cover of its latest issue, referring to an article inside, entitled “Periods on Display,” a review of an exhibit about the history of menstruation at the Vagina Museum in London.
Maybe the editors, who tweeted the piece, were just looking for clickbait, with a pullquote on the cover teasing that “Historically, the anatomy and physiology of such bodies have been neglected” — this although the author had used the phrase “bodies with vaginas,” only once and “women” four times.

But…but…there are trans men who menstruate and have vaginas. There are trans women who do not have them, and do not belong in an article about menstruation. There are cis women who do not have vaginas, and large numbers of both cis and trans women who do not menstruate. Acknowledging their existence and medical relevance is not erasing cis women at all. But Ms DiManno seems determined to erase trans men (who we call “men”, to keep it simple) and trans women (called “women”, that forbidden word in the minds of TERFs), all by inventing a totally non-existent imaginary problem.

It seems to be a common disease among right-leaning people who need imagined persecution to help them keep up their own sense of identity, so they have to create grievances. Without them, their concerns do seem to be rather petty and indefensible.

How I spend my day off

It should be spent on grading, but instead my morning was tied up with blood tests and X-rays. The doctor is suspecting something suspicious is going on, so I donated a quart for blood tests and got thoroughly irradiated for a while.

Might live a little longer, just because I’m getting pissed off.

Not my neighbors, I don’t think

But I wouldn’t put it past some of the other locals. It seems some of our far-right Trumpkin Americans are blustering on Tik-Tok about rising up and murdering the libs, bragging about putting up black flags as a sign of no quarter given (I think they’re usually accustomed to flying white flags). Their reasoning, though, is bizarre.

So, we’re the enemy, and they’re openly professing to want to execute us… So, why are they doing this?

Covid vaccinations, mostly. They believe that Joe Biden has declared a civil war on them by mandating that employers with over 100 employees and the military have vaccinations.

Yes, they say civil war, and they say it’s already started. But, unfortunately, many of them also live in states where masks and vaccines are required by state governments, healthcare, and law enforcement.

An alarming number of military members have been making Tik Toks talking about how they are being discharged because they refuse the vaccine. It’s alarming because there is probably an equal number of guys on there talking about the civil war plans and actively using Tik Tok to recruit these military and ex-military members.

The biggest message they have been sending out is, “it’s time” or “the time is now.”

They primarily use Tik Tok as a recruiting tool and let others know their willingness to commit violence. Then they tell people to message them or where to find them on Telegram.

I’m not scared. I think this is a small fringe of fanatical assholes, and if they were to rise up they’d cause some people grief and pain before they’d be put down. They rely on hiding in the shadows to have any courage.

What bugs me most is how goddamned stupid their ideas are.

We’re #7!

Climbing up in the polls, Minnesota takes the 7th position in number of COVID-19 hospitalizations. Why? Because nobody here is taking it seriously. No masks, no vaccine requirements, public schools are wide open, who cares if Grandma dies.

I talked with my son the Army Major this afternoon, and the military takes it seriously, that’s for sure. They require vaccinations. He has just been shipped off to participate in planning a Southeast Asian military exercise, and they make sure the Army isn’t infecting the world. First thing, they park him in quarantine quarters in Bangkok: no visits, can’t leave the room, can’t fraternize with his fellow soldiers, nothing. It’s like prison for a week before they let him out to make restricted, official duty tours to check on the status of the exercise, then he comes back to Bangkok for organizational meetings and to get thoroughly tested before flying him back. It’s no fun, but I’m impressed. That’s what it takes.

Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota just casually opened its doors to all the students, let them come flooding back in, with very few restrictions other than requiring masks in campus buildings. I am not impressed. The state’s response to the growing pre-winter surge in infections is to offer $200 to teenagers who get vaccinated (that’s good), encourage oldsters to get booster shots (I qualify!), and nada else. I say bring back the mask mandate, demand that people have to carry a vaccine passport to use public facilities, and get serious about dealing with the problem once and for all.

Also, tell the lunatic man-babies who whine about muh freedumbs to sit the fuck down, shut up, and be responsible adults.

She’s three. She was two, but now she is three.

It’s now official. Iliana blows out the candles on her chocolate covered chocolate donut with chocolate ice cream.

There was a problem. The donut was covered with gooey chocolate and the ice cream was melting, which made picking it up with her fingers problematic. Problem solved.

When the bulk had been gnawed down, then it was time for a little finesse.

Donut conquered. Do not get in the way of this fierce three year old.

Now it’s time for presents. There’s a cat trapped in the chimney of the dollhouse, so she’ll teach it how to use claws to climb down.

How can a child’s birthday party not be a disaster?

I attended my granddaughter’s third birthday party yesterday, with some trepidation. I like her very much, but I’m an experienced parent, and I know how these things usually go. Take an excited child, give her lots of attention, stuff her with sweet rich treats, and spoil her with presents, and you just know there’s going to be at least one tantrum and that the event will end in frustrated tears.

This party had more than its share of concerns.

One, a terrible awful grandpa. I’m still dealing with pain and mobility issues from tendinitis, which I’m dealing with with medication that keeps me going through the day, but unfortunately, as it wears off, I crash hard. I was afraid that, come the evening, I was going to turn into a saggy, cranky tired old man. More than usual, anyway.

Two, this turned into a big party, the largest my daughter has held at her house — both sets of grandparents! Cousins! Friends! — all focusing their attention and cheer on one little girl. Overstimulation city, man.

Three, Iliana had helped make her birthday dessert. She chose to get chocolate donuts, which she drenched with chocolate frosting, and topped with chocolate ice cream. I feared those little heaps of sugary intensity.

Fourth, every one of her adult visitors brought one or more presents. They piled up on one wall, and it was going to be an impressive haul.

I predicted doom. All the ingredients were there.

And then everything was fine! I don’t know how, exactly.

Skatje solved the cranky grandpa problem by working all afternoon to make a fabulous vegetarian meal for the adults, a delicious Italian vegetable soup and lasagna. Grandpa turned into a mellow, satisfied old man with a warm glow in his tummy.

Iliana pigged out on chocolate donuts and ice cream by literally sticking her snout in it and licking it all up, happily. She ate as much as she wanted, which was not excessive, and then stopped and skipped off to play. She opened her presents with enthusiasm and was excited about all of them, and solved all the concerns about spoiled little monsters having tantrum by just being darned cheerful about everything. Her mom and grandpa helped assemble her new dollhouse, we played a quiet game for a while (the bunny family and the alpaca family were moving in, but the alpacas were frightened and hiding because the rabbits were such good pouncers). Then she toddled off to bed where her mom read a book to her and she fell asleep.

Thus was I deprived of a dramatic story. My predictions were all falsified. All I can assume is that Skatje and Kyle are better parents than I was, and managed to produce a well-adjusted happy child.