The madness unparalleled, genuinely epic

James O’Brien explains the chaos in the UK. He’s incredulous at how incapable Parliament is at confronting a bad idea like Brexit. I’m similarly boggled at how the US is incapable of confronting the obvious problem that the president and leaders of congress are venal incompetents are sending us careening down a greased chute to our doom.

But at least it fills me with a feeling of deep connection with people across the Atlantic. We’re both neck deep in shitholes.

Jury duty tomorrow

Maybe. Being on sabbatical means I had no excuse to skip it, but what do you think the odds are that the lawyers send me away for being a godless sciencey nerd? I’ll prepare for a long day, but I kind of expect I’m not the kind of person they’ll want to serve — you know, all weird and stuff, not representative of the community.

But I wouldn’t mind experiencing it all!

Spider update (no photos)

We’re in a mundane phase of this project — I’ve got swarms of baby spiders, a handful of wild-caught adults, and I’m waiting for them to reach sexual maturity, so I can start breeding lab lines.

I’ve got a naming convention — the wild-caught adults (Generation 1) all get simple names like Cathy, Barney, Gwyneth, etc. I’ve had a few of them die off already, although I think it was actually murder. It seems that crickets above a certain size are actually able to turn the tables and eat the spider, or at least kill it, and they will definitely consume an egg sac if they stumble on it. I’m learning lessons as I go along — only small crickets. I’m considering trying mealworms as a safer alternative.

For the second generation, each clutch gets named by the first letter of their mother’s name, and the month their egg sac was made. As they reach sexual maturity, they’ll get a letter after the month to distinguish them as individuals. Third generation will get the initials of both parents, but we’re not up to that point yet. I am planning to keep track of the pedigrees of these spiders as I go, in case something unique and interesting crops up.

I do have a sad story. I’ve been particularly watching on individual, GIIXa, Gwyneth’s daughter by an unknown father, laid in August. I’d been calling her Igor, because she had a few deformities — her left foreleg was much longer than her right (it looked like a duplication of one limb segment), and her two hindlegs had limited mobility, so she crawled around dragging her hindlegs, and with her left foreleg raised high up in the air. She made it to near-adulthood, so clearly she was able to capture and eat flies, but today I found that she had died at last. I’d actually be interested in teratological defects, and that I’ve already seen one isn’t too surprising, given how prolific the spiders are.

I’m also pretty sure some of the second generation are reaching sexual maturity, which is about right, since some of them are almost two months old. I’ve got one, AIIXa (a son of Amanda), which already has the massive dark pedipalps that allowed me to recognize him as male — he’ll be losing his virginity soon. I don’t want to give him to one of the first generation females, since they’re so much bigger they might just eat him, but am waiting to be confident that one of the second generation females is ready.

I’m a little bit nervous about getting this next generation to maturity, because I’ve noticed that this species has become scarce as the weather is changing. We noticed that the best spots for finding them this past summer were our garage and sun room, places with lots of fresh air (and diverse prey, I presume) that were still sheltered by the proximity of a human habitat. We couldn’t find any indoors, but only in these attached spaces. Now we’re only finding Pholcidae out in the garage, as if there has been a seasonal shift in the spider populations. It’ll be interesting to see what spider species survive a Minnesota January. Maybe Steatoda/Parasteatoda are moving indoors? Maybe they die off and leave behind egg sacs to weather the winter and emerge in the spring? I’ve got my eye on a couple of egg sacs attached to my garage door, and I may bring them into the warm to see if they hatch out.

Anyway, that’s all I’m doing right now, the tedious business of spider breeding. I’ve ordered some of the reagents I’ll need to start poking around spider embryos, but those won’t arrive until next month, and I’m not doing experiments on babies until I have a stable colony anyway.

I would vote for a “radical socialist kick boxing lesbian” in a flash

Have you noticed how Republican insults are becoming a genuine mark of pride? Sharice Davids is running for Congress, and is getting some heat from local Republicans in Kansas.

Davids is a unique candidate for the 3rd Congressional District seat up for grabs this November. If elected, the Ho Chunk Nation member would be the first Native American woman elected to Congress in U.S. history and would also be the first gay Kansan to represent the state in Washington. She’s also a former MMA fighter and currently works as a lawyer, having obtained her law degree from Cornell. This election cycle, she may be at the top of a historic group of emboldened Native candidates, who happen to overwhelmingly be women.

She sounds awesome. Her existence prompted Michael Kalny, a two-bit racist precinct committeeman, to write to the head of the county Democratic Women chapter with this little rant.

Little Ms. Pritchett- you and your comrades stealth attack on Yoder is going to blow up in your leftist face. The REAL REPUBLICANS will remember what the scum DEMONRATS tried to do to Kavanaugh in November. Your radical socialist kick boxing lesbian will be sent back packing to the reservation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To quote Terry Pratchett, “And all those exclamation marks, you notice? Five? A sure sign of someone who wears his underpants on his head.” I’m not sure what he’d make of someone who used fifty exclamation marks.

Never forget. This is what Republicans are all about: racism, homophobia, misogyny, and oppression. That little pissant might get what he wants, now that the Supreme Court supports voter suppression laws that discriminate particularly severely against Indians, unless we all turn out the vote and kick these assholes back into the dead past.

Where is all this BS coming from?

I was introduced to another good take-down of that silly anti-“grievance studies” campaign. What I particularly appreciated is that this one recognizes the role of a key disseminator of bad science: Steven Pinker.

The obscure venue of choice for their account of the hoax, Areo Magazine, models itself on the magazine Aeon but in fact contains low-grade content obviously too petty or pedestrian even for Quillette (“Not All Men is Not a Fallacy. It is Humanism”). Yet what generated the Areo article’s viral lift were strong endorsements from the usual suspects—Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson, both senior psychology professors—and the budding reactionary Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer in government but also head of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. The orthodoxy these men represent is not an orthodoxy of scientific legitimacy but rather the emerging consensus of tech bros, Davos billionaires, and alt-right misogynists. Each of these groups has its own reasons to hate feminist and other critical scholarship—whether for ideological reasons, positivist data fetishism, or the perception that they are uncommodifiable and hence worthless.

I hadn’t heard of Mounk…but the Tony Blair Institute? I distrust him already. But we haven’t gotten to the real skewering yet.

It is hard to imagine a form of scholarship less rigorous, more motivated by nonscientific concerns, and more warped by political hobbyhorses than what these men practice. Steven Pinker routinely misrepresents the scholarship he relies on in his books; a 2013 meta-analysis of the burial sites he studies in his argument on the decline of violence reveals that nearly every one of them has been misunderstood or distorted, without any noticeable impact on its popularity. Yet he can never be effectively corrected by any fellow scholar, because the outsized power he wields due to his media platform will always give his views more visibility. Peterson is even worse, a neo-Jungian fantasist whose basic ideas about animal and human behavior are so egregiously wrong he no longer even bothers to justify them through standard scholarly practice. Mounk catapulted to media prominence entirely on the basis of a conveniently-timed claim that recent survey data showed an alarming collapse in support for democracy in Western societies; though critics soon called his analysis cherry-picked and inaccurate, his reputation as the premier pundit of the liberal-technocrat class remains untarnished. In each of these cases, it is celebrity, status, and money that immunize a would-be scholar from criticism and disincentivize any revisions to their views. These extra-academic factors have a much greater effect on shaping our own daily lives than the private politics of most fat studies scholars, for they spread incorrect conclusions to a very wide audience and give it the imprimatur of elite academic institutions.

It doesn’t even mention his efforts to prop up that bullshit discipline, evolutionary psychology. Why didn’t the hoaxers target the evo psych journals? They’d be an easy get, because so many of the papers in them are already garbage.

Apparently, the key to fame, fortune, and glory is to always support the status quo and tell the wealthy of the world what they want to hear. Dammit. I keep missing the money train because I’d rather dynamite the tracks, so I only have myself to blame.

As for Peterson, have you seen the The Wisdom of Jordan Peterson, a word salad generator? He’s as easy to dismiss as Deepak Chopra.

I’ve been possessed!

You’re not going to be able to trust that I’m the author of anything I post here. You see, last night I read this thing about how the alt-right was furious at Taylor Swift because she endorsed some Democrats — the fury of Andrew Anglin, that demented Nazi, was gratifying to see — and it included one of Swift’s videos. Now I’m rather ignorant of Swift. I’ve probably heard her songs before, but just as the usual pop music background noise, I’ve never made the association between who she is and what songs she sings, and this was the first time I’d actually paid attention to any of her music.

Uh-oh. I liked it. It’s catchy and energetic. It’s got a good message, too. I can see how the kids can get into her.

And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, I decided to watch some TV before bed, and some alien force made me turn on The Great British Bake-Off. God help me, I watched two episodes before tearing myself away.

It was all the niceness. It was a shock to the system, and might just kill me. A couple of hours without rage? What will keep my heart beating?

After Kavanaugh’s Destruction…

That’s news to me, but it’s actually good news, I’m just missing the details. Did he explode, was he loaded into a missile and fired into the sun, was he fed to crocodiles? Inquiring minds want to know.

That was the title of a whine by Rod Dreher, wonders After Kavanaugh’s Destruction, Who Is Safe? Really, that’s his title.

Someone should break the harsh news to his persecution complex that Kavanaugh wasn’t destroyed, but was instead appointed to the Supreme Court, the pinnacle of achievement for an American lawyer who likes his brewskis. The President of the US made it a great big partisan event! A Facebook executive threw a big party for him (Facebook loves the Trumpster, and the Russians who make all those ad buys for him). The Nazis are celebrating on the internet!

I don’t know how he missed it all. Maybe it’s because his source on this article is David Brooks, whose head is so far up his own ass that he vocalizes by vibrating his hemorrhoids while farting.

But if there’s anyone dumber than David Brooks, it’s Rod Dreher. He proceeds to out-Brooks Brooks with a story.

I can’t tell this story often enough: In my rural Southern town, back in the 1940s, a black man and a white woman were discovered in sexual congress. The woman accused him of rape. The sheriff and two deputies hunted the black man down through the woods, captured him, dragged him back to the jailhouse, and lynched him. Days later, the white accuser broke down under the weight of her conscience. She confessed that the black man had been her lover. She had accused him of rape to save her own reputation in that white supremacist culture.

There was never any chance that that black man would have had the opportunity to defend himself in court. There was never any chance that he would be considered innocent until proven guilty. Everybody (that is, all whites, who held all the power) knew that black men seethed with lust for white women. Everybody knew that no white woman could possibly find black men sexually desirable. In a case like this one, there’s no need for a fair trial; you believe the woman. If you don’t believe the woman, and exact swift and sure punishment for her assailant, then it will be open season for black men to rape white women. That was what the power-holders in that time and place believed.

So let me get this straight. In this metaphor for the current situation, a wealthy white prep school boy and Yalie is…the Southern black man in the 1940s? And Christine Blasey Ford is the wicked woman who lied to protect her honor…by stepping forward and revealing an otherwise unknown act, paying for it with loss of security, the need to leave her home, and receiving a deluge of death threats? And “lynching” is being used as a synonym for “being appointed to the Supreme Court”?

Does Dreher think Ford and Kavanaugh were secret lovers? I would not be surprised. Conservatives have been flinging all kinds of ludicrous justifications around.

Everything about this story is totally inappropriate and misplaced. This is a guy weaponizing racism to make bogus excuses for a wealthy, privileged white man.

His conclusion is also bizarre.

Brett Kavanaugh, from what I can tell, is a by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican. If the liberal mob can turn him into History’s Greatest Monster on the basis of unsupported allegations from his teenage years, and on the basis of his race and gender, then who is safe?

Errm, “by-the-book pinstriped Washington Republican” has become synonymous with “History’s Greatest Monster”. That’s not the work of a liberal mob, but the actions of Republicans — you can’t support Republican policies like denial of science, gutting of education, an overt attack on women’s autonomy, widespread corruption and incompetence, and then be surprised when people wear garlic necklaces and throw holy water as you pass by.

And who is safe? Men who didn’t assault women. It’s like suddenly every Republican is tugging at their collar and beading up with sweat, as if they have a guilty conscience or something. It makes one wonder.