How wrong can you be? How twisted can your perspective get? Just ask an incel.
So wrong it makes creationists look reasonable. I’m not even going to try to address any of that BS, except to note that anyone who bases their arguments on sexual market value
is delusional and anti-science. Is there a stronger prefix than “anti-“? Like so far to an extreme contrary position that you’re ripping a tear in the fabric of space-time?
Yeah, found on We Hunted the Mammoth.
Actually, everything is. Evolution is inescapable.
He certainly has some weird ideas we wouldn’t accept if a more conventional Christian said them.
Here Peterson recaptures ground that’s become unfashionable in modern psychology. His model is heavily influenced by Freud and Jung. “You don’t know yourself,” he says. We are not who we thought we were. We carry secret, shameful knowledge that’s scarcely accessible to conscious exploration (Freud). We also carry elements of a Collective Unconscious (Jung) that’s glimpsed via our myths and creation narratives. If you think you are an atheist you are wrong, says Peterson, because your mind has been bent and shaped and molded by a god-fearing past stretching back into the unfathomable abysm of time.
Freud still has some influence with psychologists, I presume, but it’s more like how biologists regard Haeckel: a smart guy who built theories on faulty premises and isn’t considered a credible source any more. Worse, he was someone with immense biases that he pretended were objectively valid. Jung was a flaky mystic. Why would a modern psychologist have anything but a historical interest in either of them?
The “collective unconscious” is nonsense. So is the idea of the kind of ancestral memory Peterson is proposing.
I would certainly agree that cultural influences shape our attitudes and beliefs, and that in a largely Christian country with a long Christian history, you can’t escape exposure. But to argue that we can’t escape that influence in our ideas is like saying that Protestants can’t exist because Catholics existed first, or that we’re all animists because our distant ancestors worshipped gazelles and feared lightning. Our minds were also shaped by a society that (at least among some of us) greatly values science and secularism, and that affects me far, far more than the fact that my great great grandparents were Lutherans, back in the old country.
The There is no such thing as an atheist
canard is one of the oldest, tiredest, most pathetic claims by religious apologists. It’s not a mark of wisdom to blurt out a cliche, not even when you dress it up in Freudian/Jungian babble.
All the arguments against intelligent design apply still, but damn, this is a persuasive argument.
John McNaughton
Do you think Trump has ever gone fishing? Ever? If he did, was he wearing a 3-piece suit at the time? What university offers a class titled “Justice Warrior”? The student looks better dressed for fishing than the guy holding the pole — who’s teaching who? Why is he fishing instead of studying? He should know better than to put a book on the ground.
The painter of this bit of propaganda does have to explain what it means, literally.
Is this actually art?
I should warn you: I’ve submitted DNA samples to both the National Genographic project and to 23andMe. As we’ve just learned, that means the police can use that data to connect DNA samples collected at crime scenes to my relatives, which means they have a lead to you even if you haven’t given a DNA sample. Honestly, if I do have any criminals in the family, I would kind of hope they could stop you with that information.
However, I don’t remember giving the police permission to use my genetic information — it was probably buried in tiny print somewhere in an agreement I signed. That’s a bit troubling. OK, a lot troubling. Now I’m wondering who else has access. So, if there’s a disease-associated trait somewhere in my background, are the insurance companies going to knock on the door of my second cousins somewhere and announce that they now have grounds to suspect that there is a medical problem lurking in their genome, and they’d better cough up some increased rates?
I went into The Avengers: Infinity War with very low expectations, and they were met, so I guess I can’t complain or ask for my money back or scream that Marvel must die, so I’ll just note that comic book movies are facing the same problems that superhero comic books have always had: when you start with a protagonist with incredible powers, where do you go from there? The answer is usually…ever upward. More powers, more powerful villains, more allies with equal or greater powers, and before you know it, the hero who was stopping purse-snatchers and bank robbers in the first issue is now deciding the fate of the entire universe with a league of demi-gods. And gods are boring.
To counter the boredom in the audience and, I’m sure, the writers, there has to be a series of metamorphoses. The name on the comic book is what sells, so you can’t just abandon 1930s Superman or 1960s Hulk, you’ve got to start changing the characters into brand new beings. New powers, new weaknesses, new conflicts, but the same old label. You know the Superman I read as a kid was not the same Superman kids read in the Depression years is not the same Superman kids are reading in the 21st century, right? It’s protean chaos.
And then there’s another part of the recipe: if the story is getting stale, bring on the crossovers! Mix and match different comic books with different formulas and different tones — it doesn’t matter. Sure, team up Spider-Man and Thor. Set Batman against Superman. Mix up the psychedelic weirdness of Dr Strange with psycho Rocket Raccoon. None of it makes any sense, but nerds love that “What if…” crap.
Infinity War is all that and more. So many characters, each with their brief moment in front of the camera. So many locations — I was getting lost, with sub-groups splitting off and charging on to sub-quests on different planets, different imaginary places on Earth, and absolutely no attention paid to time. Apparently, in the Marvel Universe, everyone who matters has their very own personal faster-than-light travel device. So many plotlines, so many different maguffins (6 arbitrary colored stones means we can easily try to achieve 6 different goals at once! Exactly what makes for an insightful movie). They’re in Wakanda for a yellow rock. They’re in New York for a green one.
Then with that buffet of chaos, they resolve everything in exactly the same way: punch stuff. Lots of punching here. There’s a gigantic set-piece battle with hordes of trans-dimensional demons led by space wizards against the futuristic technology of Wakanda and Tony Stark, and it’s just a brawl with everyone punching everything else in hand-to-hand combat. The main villain, Thanos, doesn’t seem to have any qualities that make him particularly potent, except that he’s very, very big and strong and can beat up the Hulk in a one-on-one fight. Somehow, I just don’t think that’s a quality that would be particularly valuable in a ruler of the galaxy.
And then there are the stakes. The stakes have become so unimaginably high that they’ve become cheap and petty all over again. Thanos’ goal is to kill half the people in the universe for what, in the movie, are simultaneously vainglorious and altruistic reasons. He’ll save us from ecological collapse, and everyone will praise him for it. So — and this is no spoiler, I won’t say who — he kills some of the heroes. In fact, I think he kills more than half, and he wipes out entire vast swathes of the Asgardians and the Dora Milaje. It’s a total bloodbath in there.
Which would be an interesting way to reboot a stale ensemble, and also make the risks the heroes are taking seem genuine and important. The death of a major character should be a huge pivot point for story.
Unfortunately, it’s not. None of them are. The slaughter was so wholesale that it took me right out of the movie. Marvel has just disintegrated multiple, massive profit-making franchises, series that made billions of dollars, in one grand gesture? I can not believe it. Not for a second. Also, if this were a genuine creative decision to reshape their movie universe to go in a new direction, we’d have known about it when the news got out of dozens of Marvel and Disney executives clutching their black bean-counting hearts and dying in apoplectic fits. Therefore, none of the major outcomes of this movie are real. There’s going to be another big budget movie in the near future in which they magically rewind everything and reset it back to it’s diversely profitable state.
We got a hint of that in this movie. One character dies, literally vaporized, and Thanos uses one of his magic rock powers to reconstitute him, take some treasure from him, and kill him again. Trust me on this: none of the deaths in this movie matter to Marvel’s bottom line, and they will be restored and repaired to go on and print more cash. It makes this whole effort futile.
But I will say this for The Avengers: Infinity War, it packed the house. I’ve never seen the Morris theater that full of people. It was also an enthusiastic crowd. The whole theater cheered when fan favorites made their first appearance: judging from the whoops, Thor, Captain America, Bucky, and the Black Panther are immensely popular. Too bad at least one of those four is going to get killed by the end.
The audience also applauded mid-movie when heroes made really good punches in the frequent slugmatches. They laughed at some of the laugh lines (there weren’t many, and they weren’t that great — a sense of humor was one of the casualties of the cosmic scope). It was a wonderfully responsive and enthusiastic audience. I definitely liked that part.
It was also amazing how, at the end of the movie, there was this tremendous hub-bub of conversation. I saw people spontaneously get into excited discussion groups, whipping out their phones and engaging with each other and the world at large, gushing and arguing about the movie. That’s a good reaction. They were not leaving, of course, because as everyone knows, Marvel always puts a teaser scene at the end of the credits, so you have to stay and wait for that. They went completely silent when the scene started — we also got to watch even more beloved movie characters die — and then just erupted and went totally nuts at the reveal of a single simple logo on Nick Fury’s cell phone. I guess we got a hint about who is going to reassemble the fractured mess this movie made of the Marvel/Disney business model.
Except, wait, the next movie is set in the 1990s. That can’t be the restoration, can it? Are they going to milk this comic book tragedy for at least two years?
Bill Cosby has been found guilty on three counts of sexual assault and faces up to ten years in prison on each. He’s 80 years old, and therefore faces the end of his life in total disgrace. It’s quite the downfall for the guy whose comedy records made me laugh, who was a revered icon at Temple University when I taught there, who became immensely popular as the star of a comedy series. Now this is what he’s come to…a convicted sex offender known to all as a creep.
At least it’s good that it caught up with him at last. Too late for the women he abused, but he gets a small taste of the punishment he deserves.
Remember Kevin Williamson, the pundit who tweeted that women who get abortions should be executed by hanging, and lost a job at The Atlantic over it? I’m not sure what should be done with such horrible people, but not being hired as an opinion writer ought to be the least of it. But guess what the Washington Post has done? They’ve given him an opportunity to write on their opinion pages! A one-time thing, I hope, because I’d rather just see him vanish.
But no. Now he gets a prominent space to rehash his ugly views. I’m going to go find a puppy to kick so I can get space where I can write more about puppy-kicking.
Shockingly, the first thing Williamson does is…denial.
So what would it mean as a practical legal matter to outlaw abortion? That is a question I have been asked frequently since being fired by the Atlantic over a four-year-old, six-word tweet and accompanying podcast in which I was alleged to have voiced an extremist view on the matter of criminalizing abortion — that it should be punished by hanging.
That isn’t my view at all.
What is this “alleged” BS? There was the tweet, which he has since deleted, closing his whole Twitter account. But then also, he was
repeatedly asked if he was joking or serious, he calmly affirmed that he was.
When Johnson pressed Williamson about whether he was serious, the National Review writer responded:
Yes, I believe that the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.
He was asked about it in a podcast, and he strongly affirmed it.
And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, ‘If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.’ And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging,Williamson said.
My broader point here is, of course, that I am a — as you know I’m kind of squishy on capital punishment in general — but that I’m absolutely willing to see abortion treated like a regular homicide under the criminal code, sure.
He even expanded on his point to say that the doctors and nurses who assisted in an abortion should also be executed! So what’s with the weasely “alleged” nonsense now?
He is lying and pretending he didn’t say it. Further, he’s now piously declaiming that he just wants moderate laws regulating abortion, just like France’s.
France, like many European countries, takes a stricter line on abortion than does the United States: Abortion on demand is permitted only through the 12th week of pregnancy. After that, abortion is severely restricted, permitted only to prevent grave damage to the mother’s health, or in the event of severe fetal abnormalities. France is not a neo-medieval right-wing dystopia.
The law in France imposes penalties on those who perform illegal abortions, ranging from forfeiture of medical licenses for doctors to fines and, in some cases, incarceration (for providers, not for the woman obtaining the abortion) ranging from six months to 10 years. Those sanctions seem reasonable to me. Why not start there and see how it works?
Start there
…that’s his key point. He sees this as the point of a wedge, leading to, he dreams, full criminalization of abortion. And look: making it illegal for unqualified people to rummage around in women’s uteruses is a good idea, and I suspect is already consider criminal under existing laws about doing physical harm to people, but that’s not what he wants. He wants to arrest and punish certified doctors, nurses, and women who want an abortion. I don’t think France does that.
But these are just Williamson’s unoriginal excuses. This argument, that they just want to be like Europe, has been around for quite a while, and is an outright lie. Katha Politt has specifically addressed this stupid anti-choice talking point.
Here’s what’s really different about Western Europe: in France, you can get an abortion at any public hospital and it’s paid for by the government. In Germany, you can get one at a hospital or a doctor’s office, and health plans will pay for it for low-income women. In Sweden, abortion is free through eighteen weeks. Moreover, unlike the time limits passed in Texas and some other states, or floating around in Congress, the European limits have exceptions, variously for physical or mental health, fetal anomaly or rape. Contrast that with what anti-choicers want for the United States, where Paul Ryan memorably described a health exception to a proposed late-term abortion ban as “a loophole wide enough to drive a Mack truck through it.” If a French or German or Swedish 12-year-old, or a traumatized rape victim, or a woman carrying a fetus with Tay-Sachs disease shows up after the deadline, I bet a way can often be found to quietly take care of them. If not, Britain or the Netherlands, where second trimester abortion is legal, are possibilities. (In 2011, more than 4,000 Irish women traveled to Britain for abortions.)
Here are some other differences: in Western Europe, teens get realistic sex education, not abstinence-only propaganda. Girls and women have much better access to birth control and emergency contraception, which are usually paid for by the government. In countries that require mandatory counseling, it is empathetic and nondirective: nothing like our burgeoning network of Christian “crisis pregnancy centers” and state laws requiring women to endure transvaginal ultrasounds, hear fetal heartbeats and look at sonograms. European doctors are not forced to read scripts that falsely warn women that abortion will give them breast cancer and drive them to suicide, and tell them that an embryo the size of a pea is “a unique living human being.” In countries that have waiting periods, distances are smaller, and just to repeat, abortion is widely available and integrated with the normal health system, not shunted off to clinics in a few cities and college towns. You do not have to travel eight hours four times to get the counseling and fulfill the waiting period—or sleep in your car or the bus station till the time is up.
And just because you’ve read this far: there are no screaming fanatics thrusting gory photos at you as you make your way to your abortion. No one takes down your license plate in the parking lot and calls you—or your parents—later with hateful messages. Doctors who perform abortions do not wear bulletproof vests, nor are they ostracized by their communities and shunned by other doctors. The whole climate of fear that makes many doctors reluctant to perform abortions and makes some women postpone going to the clinic does not exist.
OK, Kevin Williamson, I do want something like that. But that is not what you want: you want gibbets installed in every town with those wanton women who didn’t want a baby hanging from them.
No one is fooled. Except, apparently, the editors at the Washington Post who were happy to let a vicious troll lie openly on their pages.
The harbingers are supposed to precede the advent of Braco the Gazer, also known as Gazer the Gazerian, Gazer the Destructor, Gazer the Traveler, Volguus Zildrohar and Lord of the Sebouillia, and yet there he is. Braco the Gazer is a New Age charlatan who has taken laziness to a new level. He does nothing. He says nothing. He writes nothing. He looks at you — for no more than 7 seconds, any more would be dangerous — and moves on. You pay $8 for the privilege of standing in a crowded room while Braco gazes at everyone.
New Age music began and all those who were able were asked to stand as Braco emerged and climbed the stairs of the podium. He stood before the room awkwardly at first, and then his pose grew majestic, like he was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Everyone watched him expectantly.
Then Braco gazed at the audience. For ten minutes.
He was expressionless, but his eyes scanned the room intensely. His head barely moved but he seemed to make eye contact, like one of those paintings where the eyes appear to follow you. As we all stared back we were looking at Braco for longer than the “safe” seven-second period.
As Braco “gazed,” some meditated or prayed, some rocked back and forth gently, and some were crying. Some held photos of sick or deceased loved ones to their chests. We’d also been told that if we had photos of people in our phones, Braco would heal them too.
Then it was all over.
And the crowd goes wild! What a gig.
Braco does do something, though: he sells stuff.
Braco also offers a line of Sunce (sun) jewelry that displays his mentor’s symbol: a golden sun with 13 rays. The price of the jewelry ranges from $190 for a pair of earrings to $2395 for a diamond pendant. Website testimonials claim these talismans bring good luck to the wearer.
You probably aren’t surprised.
