Let’s all forget that Gad Saad exists

The other day, while I was browsing, I was interrupted by an ad for PragerU. I despise PragerU, the totally fake university that specializes in fake history and fake science, led by that smarmy old fraud, Dennis Prager. What caught my ear, though, is that this ad featured Gad Saad desperately pushing his new book, Suicidal Empathy.

I have not read the book. I will never read the book. Gad Saad is a pathetic figure, a pick-me guy for the right wing, who is a professor of marketing who rides the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I’ve written about him a few times before, in particular his efforts to deny the existence of toxic masculinity while simultaneously exemplifying the attitudes and stereotypes that represent toxicity. Like any good evo psych wanker, he justifies treating women poorly by mentioning animals with aggressive, violent mating strategies, as if they apply to us.

Even Larry Moran, who doesn’t normally dip into culture war issues, ripped Gad Saad a new one. Saad is just a sad embarrassment of a man who desperately wants to be legitimized by more successful evo-psych grifters, but doesn’t quite have the smarts to assemble a coherent, logical argument.

I got the gist of his thesis from the ad. He’s trying to thread a needle here: he can’t quite say that empathy is bad, because he wants you to empathize with him, but at the same time he wants you to know that the empathy practiced by Leftists is undeniably evil and wicked. Empathy that leads you to regard Muslims as human beings is “suicidal,” after all. And don’t get him started on women and “effeminate” men!

The book is reviewed in Jacobin, and the review confirms everything I’d expect of Saad.

For those of you who don’t know who he is — likely a larger group than he’d be willing to admit — Saad is a Canadian professor at Concordia University who has spent the last few years as a major figure in anti-woke online spaces. Long regarded as a poor man’s Jordan Peterson, Saad has since grown in stature through his indomitable quest to kiss every square inch of Elon Musk’s ass. Elon has returned the favor by beating the drum for Saad’s ideas through a manic series of Tweets, frenetic even by his standards.

Reviews of Saad’s recent book, even by the ideologically sympathetic, suggest even his natural fan base is tuning out. Center-right outlet Quillette resented Saad’s “narcissistic ramblings,” while a scathing review in UnHerd described Suicidal Empathy as peddling “fake science” and relying “on a relentless drumbeat of fear-mongering regarding rape and crime.” That even his ideological friends are tiring of this shtick is a testament to how mind-numbingly boring Suicidal Empathy is.

Uh-oh–when an evolutionary psychologist loses the affection of Quillette, you know he’s on the way out. He relies on caricatures of left wing perspectives that he exaggerates into absurdity, so it’s no surprise that his arguments fall apart, even if you sympathize with his views. He has to distort everything to make his case.

Nominally the book is about the rise of “suicidal empathy.” Undeniably a catchy neologism, Saad defines suicidal empathy as a “dysregulation of an otherwise noble virtue.” While he acknowledges that empathy is valuable in some contexts, in the hands of woke progressives it has become an existentially damaging force. The “suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not so fortunate. They feel guilty that they were born with white skin and hence suffer from ‘Dermatological Original Sin.’ By committing Civilization Seppuku, they can demonstrate their noble virtues as a form of pious self-hatred.”

This dysfunctional empathy, often emotionally adjacent to liberal narcissism via the drive to applaud oneself as more noble and altruistic, is at the root of virtually every progressive stance ever taken. For Saad, “epistemological empathy” is invoked in academia to silence those committed to a “deontological” quest for the truth. Toleration for Muslims is a form of “Islamophilic empathy.” Empathy for criminals leads us to care “more about the rights of rapists and felons than their victims.” Climate activism is “misguided empathy” from those who want to “protect Mother Earth from being raped by capitalism.” Socialism itself — which Saad points out is preferred by women, a point against it — is rooted in “misguided empathy.”

He’s playing a simple-minded game. If you don’t think black people should be discriminated against for the color of the skin, well, that must mean you hate and are ashamed of white people. If you think we should protect ecologies from raging industrialism, by golly, you really hate capitalism. And if you like socialism, you’re a woman, you pussy.

Now you can understand why I won’t read his book. The banality is exhausting. I’ve seen a few of his videos and read a few of his articles, and know that he’s simply a knee-jerk bigot. Hard pass.

To be fair, though, I should at least quote some of Gad Saad’s own words.

In other words, women are more likely than men to violate the deontological principles that define academic freedom, freedom of speech, and the pursuit and defense of truth, in the service of a consequentialist ethos rooted in misguided empathy. The rapid feminization of academia has been astonishing to watch. I have recently attended departmental meetings where it was unclear to me that it was not a kindergarten classroom in terms of the incessant focus on emotional safety and empathetic understanding.

Does that sound like a man anyone, especially any woman, would want to spend 5 minutes in conversation with? Does he even sound like he’s aware of the bigotry implicit in his words?

I’ve been in many departmental meetings, and yes, the safety and well-being of our students comes up fairly often — because it matters. If you were a student, would you want a professor who rolls his eyes at the thought of trying to understand you?

It’s going to be a boring election season in Minnesota

The state conventions have put up their choices for governor, since Walz has announced that he won’t be running.

On the Democratic side, we’ll have Amy Klobuchar, the current senator. I can’t get excited about her — she’s your standard inoffensive middle-of-the-road Democrat, a reliable candidate with lots of money behind her. I’ll almost certainly vote for her, with no enthusiasm.

The Republican side is trying to be exciting, but just comes off as weird. Of course Mike Lindell, the My Pillow guy, was nattering around the edges, talking a big game, but no way were our Republicans going to get that weird — he lost the nomination, but don’t worry, you know he’s going to continue to flush his money away in a quixotic campaign.

The actual Republican nominee is…Kendall Qualls. You’ve never heard of him. He pops up here now and then, runs for an office, fails, and then we all forget him until the next election. His claim to fame is that he is a healthcare executive. They might as well have nominated Satan for all the popularity he’d have.

Satan might have been a better choice, since the Republicans also announced their commitment to outright evil.

The convention day began at 9 a.m. with a prayer from Father Richard Kunst of Duluth that the adopted platform of the party “promotes true, good, conservative values, fiscally and socially,” followed by the Pledge of Allegiance.

A delegate then called for a moment of silence for Derek Chauvin, who was convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020 and is in prison. State Rep. Danny Nadeau, R-Rogers, led a 10-second moment of silence after taking an informal vote.

Monday was the sixth anniversary of Floyd’s death.

And then after hailing Derek Chauvin, they all met their Grindr dates and went off to a black mass, where they drank the blood of poor children.

I wonder what happened to the coward who attacked Jey?

Jey McCreight is an old friend I’ve known since they were a an undergraduate studying biology in Indiana. I’ve been happy to see their accomplishments over the years: grad school, a post-doc, landing a job at 23andMe as a genomics expert. They were also an activist in the atheist movement — Jey was one of the minds behind Atheism+, and we all know how well that effort to incorporate more humanism into atheism went. Now they are still an activist, founding the organization BeyondXandY arguing that biology is nonbinary and that people are more than their chromosomes. Jey clearly is bold and optimistic enough to take on noble causes in spite of all the haters, and doing the right thing as a trans man has got to be one of the braver things they have done.

Last month, this happened:

McCreight said they had been advertising the event with flyers across the city that included their photo and had also appeared in the local LGBTQ+ publication, Windy City Times. They assume the event’s publicity is how the attacker recognized them.

“I’m telling this story now because I’m finally in a place where I can talk about it without really freaking out badly,” McCreight said, explaining that there are still a lot of gaps in their memory of that night, but they think they were walking home alone from getting food.

The attacker asked if they were McCreight, and McCreight cheerfully confirmed, assuming it might be someone who appreciated their work.

“He very quickly pushed me to the ground and started repeatedly punching me in the eye,” McCreight said. “Afterward, I thought he had maybe hit me with a brick or something because it was so painful. I had never been beat up before in my life.”

McCreight said the attacker also used a pocket knife to cut them all over their body, but not deep enough to leave permanent damage.

“It was very scary. He even tried to strangle me briefly with something that thankfully didn’t work well and just kind of left an abrasion on my neck.”

McCreight said they don’t remember how they got away or if the person eventually just let them go. But somehow, they got home. It took them over a day to realize they needed an ambulance because they were in such a daze.

But on May 1, McCreight recounted, they realized they needed help. An ambulance took them to Chicago’s Advocate Health Center, where they said they received excellent care, which included emergency surgery on their eye. After that, it took weeks for their vision to return to normal.

“I think it’s really important for people to know that this is the reality of being trans in the United States,” they said. “I’m a non-violent nerdy cat guy who likes talking about science and wants to be the next Bill Nye, and because of that, someone basically tried to kill me or at least beat me up bad enough to scare me into silence.”

They said for a little bit, they considered giving up their public-facing activism in the wake of the attack. But then, hospital staff of all kinds – from doctors to nurses to the people bringing them meals – all learned about McCreight’s work and told them to keep going.

“They all told me not to give up on my dream.”

Horrifying. That some guy would just turn and attack a friendly, nerdy fellow walking down the street because they are trans is appalling. Listen to them telling their own story, and support BeyondXandY.

I have been replaced

I’m a bit frustrated — this stupid knee doesn’t allow me to walk on rough ground. I can handle floors and sidewalks, but this part of my yard where Mary has been planting new berry bushes is mostly inaccessible to me. Yesterday, Mary tells me she has spotted some interesting new spiders on the leaves. Can I come look? Not without risking a fall.

It would be a bit much for me to hand her my Canon D8 with the 100mm macro lens, so instead I gave her a clip-on magnifying lens for her iPhone, which she was already comfortable using, and she went off into No Man’s Land and got a bunch of very nice photos of these tiny (less than 3mm) guys, and left me feeling useless.

Anyway , what she had found was a lot of meshweavers, small spiders that put down sheet webs, which they use to catch smaller prey, like aphids and leafhoppers. Meshweavers are a gardener’s friend, so it’s good to see them hard at work protecting our raspberries. This is a dwarf spider, also called a money spider:

And this is a pair of dimorphic meshweavers. One species, but males and females look dramatically different.

Clearly, it’s time for me to hang up my pretense of being an arachnologist and teach Mary how to use the D8. I’ll just park myself in a rocking chair on the deck and watch her have all the fun.

Don’t ask me for diet advice

Oh no. I have been asked for dietary advice.

I am not qualified. I’ve never taken a nutrition course, I have no degree in the field, you should not take nutrition advice from me. That’s the simple answer.

On the other hand, I’m aware of the problem: there are unholy swarms of people and ‘influencers’ who have less knowledge of basic biology than I do who are flooding the zone with all kinds of cockamamie ideas based primarily on ideology. Sometimes the people who pretend to have the most knowledge about the human body give the very worst advice, so how do you figure out what is good advice? I mean, you’ve got total wackaloons who have driven themselves into induced comas and neurotic breakdowns telling you to eat nothing but beef; you’ve got other nerds insisting that everyone must avoid meat, eggs, and gluten (which is necessary for some people); and then you’ve got breatharians and other insane people who believe in living on diet Coke and Big Macs.

On the third hand, human beings have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without TikTok, eating what was available and tasted good, and cultivating wonderful cuisines without relying on bizarre notions of what some wild-eyed skinny fanatic said. That’s the thing about nutrition: traditions are good guides because they’re the product of people who survived their diet. OK, French sauces and hakarl might be extreme and bad for you in the long run, but human experimentation also gave us curries and bread. We haven’t died of anything like that unless consumed in excess.

My general guide to eating is simple: moderation in everything. Avoid heavily processed foods. Try a variety of things, a ‘balanced’ diet. Beans, rice, and potatoes can be the solid foundation for your diet, and have the additional virtue in these tight economic times of being cheap. Build on them with spices — I feel like one of the cardinal sins of the American diet is the spice deficiency. Spices make mundane, boring, but reliable staples interesting and allow you to get flavor without feeling like you have to indulge in buying exotic, expensive, heavily processed foods.

Add stuff you can find in season. I like to add a piece of fish to a meal for a bit of richness…or use an egg, or some broccoli, or a side of peas. Avoid uniformity.

Learn how to make a paella, or a curry, or a stew. Just the process of assembling all the elements of these kinds of foods guarantees that you’ll get a dietary variety, and it will taste good. I trust tradition far more than I do the latest influencer fad. Your best bet is to ignore people like me and just spend more time in the produce section of your grocery store, gathering up tomatoes and turnips and cabbage and mushrooms and carrots and peppers and onions and cauliflower and green beans and garlic, and then figure out how to cook them and make a delicious meal. Pick up a variety of fruits for dessert.

It takes a bit more effort than picking up a box of premade something-or-other, but it would be better for you.

This too shall pass

A little bit of good news: Trump’s name might get chiseled off of his attempts at immortality soon. A judge has ruled that the Kennedy Center should have its good name restored.

US district judge Christopher Cooper, Trump noted, had ruled that his handpicked board members, who “unanimously voted to add the name ‘TRUMP’ onto the former Kennedy Center, making it The Trump Kennedy Center, did not have the right to do such an addition, and the name, ‘TRUMP,’ must be removed”.

He mad. He has to know that once he is inevitably out of power (preferably by being hauled out on a stretcher), all his vainglorious attempts to scribble his name all over everything will be eradicated.

So we can also hope that eventually his mad rulings about vaccines, at the behest of his brain-worm infected buddy, RFK jr, will be erased in time. So look at this executive order to strip children of protections with a grim sense of happiness deferred.

An executive order signed by Donald Trump with little fanfare on Friday could have a huge impact on the health of US children, as it instructs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to cut the number of recommended childhood vaccines almost in half.

The vague language of the order, which refers to “a scientific assessment that compared United States childhood immunization recommendations with those of peer nations” published in January by anti-vaccine activist Robert F Kennedy’s health and human services department, does not explicitly state that the new recommendation removes vaccines against seven diseases from the schedule.

The assessment, co-authored by the subsequently fired vaccine skeptic Dr Tracy Beth Høeg, concluded that the CDC director should update the childhood immunization schedule “to keep vaccines for 10 diseases – measles, mumps, rubella, polio, pertussis, tetanus, diphtheria, Haemophilus influenzae type B (Hib), pneumococcal disease, and human papillomavirus (HPV) – for which peer, developed nations share international consensus, as well as varicella (chickenpox) … in the category of vaccines recommended for all children”.

Implementing that recommendation would mean removing vaccines for these diseases from the recommended schedule:

hepatitis A
hepatitis B
meningitis
rotavirus
influenza
Covid-19

The assessment also recommended cutting the number of doses of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, vaccine from two or three (depending on the child’s age) to one.

Someday the proper medically-informed schedule will be restored, and we can celebrate that. Someday. For now, we just have to deal with the suffering and death of a few babies. We just have to wait until the light is restored.

(I’m actually not going to celebrate until RFK jr is prosecuted for crimes against humanity, or his mangy rotting corpse is buried deep in the ground, whichever comes first.)

Eat and live

I’ve been a distracted mess lately, with all this PT stuff as well as a week of administrative malarkey, but I did notice a a provocative comment that I feel compelled to respond to.

Upon accepting the risk of dispensing an unpopular remark: One day, we shall have to set nature in order using genetical engineering.

No creature should devour any other.

Wow. That makes no sense. We humans are obligate heterotrophs — we must obtain certain vital molecules by consuming other organisms. For example, we cannot synthesize valine, isoleucine, leucine, methionine, phenylalanine, tryptophan, threonine, histidine, or lysine, so we have to consume other organisms that contain those substances, or we die. I guess we can define “creature” to escape the problem, which is the vegetarian solution. We don’t eat meat from animals by making the decision that plants don’t count. It’s very convenient to say that killing carrots or yeast or lettuce is ethically OK, but if you think about it all deeply, even a carrot is a product of processes that kill insects with pesticides. Do insects count? What about protists? The lines are all arbitrary and we each draw our own lines.

Is our solution to genetically modify humans so they can synthesize every molecule we need? Or are we going to build factories to create all these essential substances as supplements?

But deeper still, the planetary biome is built on dependencies contingent on death and consumption, in every food web that exists. For example, sea otters eat sea urchins; sea urchins eat kelp; when sea otters are eliminated, the kelp forests die. How do we genetically engineer “devouring” out of the system without necessarily deleting entire ecologies? The only way any of this can happen is by magic.

Nature is already in order, reordering it to your preferences is silly.

Shouldn’t a president be mildly aware of the world around him?

Here we go again. Trump’s idea of diplomacy is a sane person’s idea of bullying.

Donald Trump has threatened to “blow up” Oman if it fails to “behave” in a casual aside during a cabinet meeting, as the US scrambles to reopen the strait of Hormuz.

I had two students from Oman this past semester. One of the things I, a mere college professor, do is look up my students’ backgrounds to avoid saying something stupid and insensitive, like “we should blow up your home”. If only our president were a tenth as aware.

SHUT THE FUCK UP, DONNY.

I choose not to be optimistic

I see a lot of online commentary anticipating that Democrats will flip the house and maybe the senate. They’ve been encouraged by the nomination of Ken Paxton, a totally repulsive corrupt sleazeball, to run against James Talarico — the idea is that that is going to weaken the Republican vote in Texas, along with other visible factors.

Over the last several days, I traveled 550 miles through trump country in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota. I have reliable information that this route was once replete with Trump shrines, but on this trip, there was one (and it was a doozy, near Effigy Mounds, Iowa). All the others had vanished some time over the winter. This isn’t Texas, but it is a very MAGA landscape, and thus a good an indicator. In at least one case, the former Trump Shrine had over the years displayed anti-abortion and various jingoistic symbology. All that stuff was still up, but the name Trump had been taken down. The point is: right wingers, even hard MAGA level right wingers, are erasing Trump from their rhetoric. Assuming that this is a national phenomenon, it matters in Texas.

And now, with the odious Paxton being put in place of the more mainstream Republcian Cornyn to run for Senate in Texas, owing to Trump loyalists following his endorsement, most observers who know Texas are saying that this seat is in play. According to The Hill, “The nonpartisan election handicapper Cook Political Report shifted its rating of the Texas Senate race toward Democrats on Tuesday from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican,” after state Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn in the marquee race’s GOP runoff.” Read that carefully. They are not projecting a Democratic win, but they are saying the race is in play.

I’ve seen fewer Trump signs in my area, too, but I can’t help but note that a majority of those Texas Republicans voted for the Trump-endorsed candidate anyway. I have seen predictions of the ‘blue wave’ for years, and every time, I’ve been disappointed. I refuse to fall for it anymore. I predict minimal change as a consequence of the midterms.

Greg Laden is only slightly more optimistic than I am.

There are strong indications that many Republican-held House seats are likely to flip over to the D column. There are reasons to hope for a slim Democratic majority in the Senate. The chances that Republicans will hold trifecta power after the new crop of electeds is planted in January is about zero. Will Texas be part of that important, historic, and civilization changing moment?

To answer that question, I refer to fashion and style guru, Melania Trump. I’d love Texas to get on board, but we don’t really need texas, and Texas always disappoints. For mere self preservation,

I could be totally wrong, and I hope I am, but I expect the Republican party of Evil will cling to their death grip on American politics for a few more years, simply because the electorate have convinced me that they’re morons.