The perfect description of Jordan Peterson

Laurie Penny, on point:

The first time I waded through the collected polemics and YouTube punditry of Professor Jordan Peterson — the unthinking man’s televangelist, inflated to the status of serious truth-seeker by respectable newspapers around the world — I was expecting to be at least slightly dazzled by his rhetoric. But no matter how long I stared at the magic-eye picture of jumbled platitudes, masturbatory nightmares about being devoured by an all-consuming mother figure, and occasional sensible tips about making your bed, it failed to resolve into a work of epoch-defining insight. Instead, it reads as if St. John the Divine of Patmos settled down and got a job selling insurance but occasionally had flashbacks to when he used to lick blue fungus off cave walls and babble about the Great Dragon.

The only way Peterson could have acquired a reputation as an intelligent person is by cultivating an audience of people who hate the humanities, and have therefore never read a well-written book.

I don’t give a good god damn who the author of that NY Times op-ed is

Everyone seems to be speculating about who the “Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” is. I don’t care, because whoever it is isn’t part of the resistance at all — they are an enabler and supporter of the goals of the administration. They even say it outright.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous. But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic. That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

See it for what it is: Republicans seeking to distance themselves from a bad president while still trying to support the same destructive policies. They are trying to represent the failings of this administration as the fault of personal incompetence of Donald Trump, hiding the fact that he is the apotheosis of Republican politics of the past 60 years.

Also, I don’t want to know who the author is. I hope they preserve their anonymity for years, so that the mad emperor starts violently tearing apart every asshole skulking in government in his efforts to root out the traitor. I hope it ends with every Republican shattered and fleeing in disgrace.

Welcome, Larry!

Uh-oh. I just submitted my first grant application (a small, in-house grant to do pilot studies) for spider research. This might be getting serious.

In more routine news, I added a new fellow to my stable today: Larry. He’s now savoring a meal before I throw him to the loving mercies of the lady spiders.

In case you were curious about how to identify spider sex, I’ll explain below the fold.

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Elon Musk really is an unpleasant jerk

He’s still stewing over his unused plan to rescue those kids stranded in a cave in Thailand, and he’s still accusing one of the guys who led the successful rescue of being a pedophile. Buzzfeed asked him for evidence of his accusation, and hoo boy, he really quadrupled down. His evidence that Unsworth is a pedophile? He’s a white guy who lives in Thailand, therefore…

Buzzfeed contacted the woman with whom he is in a long-term relationship. Just the simple fact of her existence seems to confound Musk’s claim.

BuzzFeed News also spoke with Woranan Ratrawiphukkun, a Thai woman who is Unsworth’s longtime girlfriend. She said she had been with Unsworth for more than seven years and has posted numerous photos about their relationship on social media dating back several years. Unsworth, she added, spends part of the year in Thailand and part of the time in the UK.

Ratrawiphukkun, who said she is 40, declined to comment on Musk’s allegations against Unsworth, and referred a reporter to his lawyers.

40? I guess the window of time for pedophilia can be stretched quite a bit. I suppose you could call me a hebephile, at least, since my wife is 6 months younger than I am.

Update on the spider soap opera (no photos)

Yeesh, but a lot of people send me piteous complaints if I post a photo of my little spider friends, so from now on I’ll either confine them below the fold, or as in this case, not have any photographs at all. I still want to give an occasional status, though.

So my tiny colony currently consists of four females and one male spider.

As I last mentioned, Sara is expecting — she was impregnated by some unknown wild male before I brought her into the lab. She’s got a voracious appetite and has sucked two crickets dry in the last 5 days.

Amanda has also been eating well. Last time, I introduced her to our one male, Harry, who was not at all subtle and jumped right on her. She didn’t seem to mind, since Harry survived the encounter.

Since Harry was so eager, I moved him to Emma‘s vial. He’s still there, still alive, but kind of curled up and looking exhausted. Emma is looking great, and was smacking her chelicerae over a fresh cricket corpse.

Xena — poor Xena, I’ve been worried about her. She doesn’t eat. There’s a juicy cricket wandering about in her vial, taunting her, and she does nothing. But today Xena made an egg sac! I guess she had her priorities.

The Nameless Swarm of spiderlings seem to be doing well. I throw a few fruit flies into their dish, and a few hours later they’re all dead. I’m going to have to clean up the charnel chaos of their home tomorrow — it’s littered with the dessicated husks of their victims. The babies are so cute.

So that’s 5 adults and three egg sacs in less than two weeks, and an uncountable horde of spiderlings. That’s a pretty good volume of animals spawned fairly quickly, which is good news for my interest in getting embryos.

I’m optimistic that I’ll have a reliably propagating colony soon, if mortality isn’t too high among the spiderlings (I’ve read that there is a lot of death to come, but there are so many I’m hoping I’ll get plenty surviving to adulthood).

I’m impressed at how easy these are to raise, so far. You ought to try it!

Owning the libs, a tale in three acts

Nike is coopting Colin Kaepernick’s protest by featuring him in an ad. It makes me slightly queasy to see Big Capitalism buying the face of a cause, but I’m not going to argue about that. Instead, the Trumpsters are losing their shit. They’re throwing away or setting their Nike clothing and shoes on fire in protest.

Which is fine — protesting is a great old tradition, they should publicly protest ideas they oppose. Kinda like how Kaepernick has been doing. So they’re protesting a guy protesting for protesting by protesting, and the irony is escaping them, as is the fact that destroying a product you’ve already purchased isn’t exactly doing Nike any harm.

It’s just stupid.

How stupid? Well, this one guy made it even stupider.

He announces his intent to burn his shoes. There’s some foreshadowing about what is to come here.

He asks everyone to retweet his principled act of bravery. OK! Happy to oblige! Uh, guy, shouldn’t you take the shoes off before you set them on fire?

Then, in the third act, the predictable outcome. You can guess where this is going. I’m putting this photo below the fold, because it is a bit grisly. He’s in the hospital now.

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The movie this week is…BlacKkKlansman

First, though, a little advertisement: starting this weekend, the Morris Theatre is holding the Prairie Light Film Festival, a whole week with a rotating roster of good movies, movies I’ve wanted to see, but had low expectations that they’d ever play in small town rural Minnesota. It’s a small, mostly white and conservative town, and we’ve long had this single screen movie theater that has had to play it safe with their choices if they want to be profitable, and that means we get movies that will appeal to college students or the general community, without a lot of risk-taking. For instance, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ was the sole movie being shown for about a month a few years ago. Enough said.

So now we’ve got this crazy wild festival coming up, and we’ve got a second screen, so finally the theater can show movies with narrower appeal, like BlacKkKlansman. Once upon a time, I would have estimated the chance of a Spike Lee film being shown in Morris as negligible — not because the theater management wouldn’t have liked to, but because they needed movies with broad appeal to the Morris audience. But now they can, and I am so happy.

BlacKkKlansman is the best movie I’ve seen this year. Right at the top of my list. Great acting, amazing story, strong and relevant theme, beautifully structured. I had no idea how they were going to pull of the central conceit of the story — a black man joins the KKK — but the way it was done, that there were two undercover cops using the same name, and it was the white guy, Adam Driver as Flip Zimmerman, who would appear at Klan meetings, while the black guy, John David Washington as Ron Stallworth, would manage everything over the phone, worked well. It also worked well because it gave both Flip and Ron opportunities to grow in the roles they were playing. Driver was great as a Jew who realizes that this is his battle, too.

But I have to say something about the end of the movie. It was the most powerful gut punch I’ve ever experienced at a movie. So below the fold is a kind of a spoiler — I’m not going to give away any details of the plot, but I am going to say a few things about the structure of the ending.

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