I was against Walz before I was for him

Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, accepted the VP nomination last night. Here’s his speech from last night.

It was a ‘greatest hits’ kind of speech, where he threw out all the familiar slogans that the Democrats have found to resonate with the public. That’s fine; I agree with the sentiments, and will be voting for Harris/Walz in November.

I figure I’d better come clean and confess that I was not happy with Walz. You can go through the archives here and find all the posts where I commented on him, so I’ll save you the effort and repost some excerpts for you so you can tell me I was wrong.

My number one complaint was his close connection to the National Rifle Association. This was a major political issue in his campaign, as he proudly advertised the fact that he was an NRA supporter.

In the Minnesota caucuses, Democrat Tim Walz came out in first place in the race for governor. He was my last choice. He’s a Democrat who is good at getting the rural — that is, conservative Democrat — vote, and I scratched him off my list for consideration on the basis of one crucial fact: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. Nope. That’s like getting praise from the KKK; it might appeal to a certain demographic, but that’s one demographic I’d like to see ignored.

Another factor was the condescension by the DFL. They figured that NRA hook was sufficient to capture the yokels of rural Minnesota. It probably worked, since he won the 2018 primary.

I took a look at the Minnesota primary election results. There weren’t really any surprises, although there was one disappointment.

The disappointment is that Tim Walz will be the DFL candidate running for governor in November. I despise Tim Walz — he’s a conservative Democrat who has been in the pocket of the NRA for years. What’s particularly galling about it is that I keep seeing people saying that they voted for Walz because he was most appealing to outstate (the obnoxious term people in the Twin Cities use for the region outside the Twin Cities) voters, so they were supporting the DFL candidate most likely to win over those Neandertals who don’t reside in the metropolitan region.

I live in “outstate” Minnesota. Grrrr. Don’t assume we’re all gun-totin’ rednecks out here.

And yes, he was a conservative Democrat. I didn’t vote for him in the primary (although I did in the general election) because there was a good strong liberal Democrat running against him.

The frontrunner is Democrat Tim Walz. I scratched him off my dance card long, long ago: he’s got an A+ rating from the NRA. That ought to be the kiss of death for any politician any more.

On the other hand, Rebecca Otto has the recommendation of environmentalists and climate scientists like Michael Mann, along with an excellent record as the state auditor. She’s pro-democracy and pro-environment.

An A+ from climate scientists vs. an A+ from the freakin’ NRA. This one’s an easy choice. I want Rebecca Otto for governor of Minnesota.

Walz did get better, fortunately, and he changed, becoming more progressive in the course of his term. I’ll admit that I was proven wrong (although I’ll bet there are a lot of rural voters in these here parts who now rue the day they voted for him), and he turned out to be a very good governor.

Still, the NRA? Jesus. I think I was justified in not trusting him.

The ghost of Gish

It’s depressing how much the right wing of politics owes to creationists. Madhusudan Katti speaks a well-recognized truth.

Veterans of the evolution wars have been alarmed at how some of the figures driving the antiscience and anti-intellectual agenda of the modern Republican Party emerged from the creationist movement. A prime example is Manhattan Institute’ Christopher Rufo, who rose from Seattle’s Discovery Institute (birthplace of “intelligent design”) to become a leading conservative intellectual; his attacks on universities have taken on dangerous proportions, linked to attacks on academic freedom in states like Florida. Such mastery of the Gish gallop manifests not just on the debate stage these days, but in the op-ed pages of major newspapers falsely demonizing “critical race theory,” decrying DEI and getting prominent university presidents fired. Rufo and like-minded advocates know how to flood the zone with a steady barrage of disinformation until, as the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt noted, “people no longer can believe anything”, losing their “capacity to act” or “to think and to judge”, and “with such a people, you can then do what you please.”

What we once thought of as an obscure reference to weird creationist tactics has become common parlance. Just about everyone knows what a Gish Gallop is, and every time a Republican steps up to a lectern we can trust them to deploy it. We have seen Trump use it; even his rallies are a random, scattershot collection of confusing nonsense. Sharks and electric batteries, anyone? Crowd sizes at his past events? Hannibal Lecter? It’s madness.

Ask one of those veterans of the evolution wars what we should do when confronted with a galloping Gish. The first bit of advice is the simplest.

The best advice for scientists, honed after years of fighting creationist and climate-denial drivel, is to eschew fake debates on stages as simply lending megaphones to liars.

Unfortunately, politicians are trapped by convention and have to do debates. So, specifically, what should someone do when compelled to participate in a debate?

Now that Biden has withdrawn from the race, the next debate, scheduled for September 10, will likely feature Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, who better be prepared to counter Trump’s Gish gallop more forcefully. She will face a well-practiced con artist and loud dissembler who will flood the zone with enough falsehoods to outshout the former prosecutor and senator. (Speaking as an evolutionary scientist, there are no prizes for guessing which side of the evolution-creation debate these two candidates fall on, either.) When it’s her turn to respond, Harris should turn the tables on Trump by calling him out as a liar without bothering to refute each lie and refocus the audience on her own message. When asked how she might respond if Trump started stalking her on stage, Harris said she would turn around and ask “Why are you being so weird?” Indeed, her campaign has already leaned into this strategy to highlight and mock just how extreme the Republican agenda has become. It just might see her win the next debate as well.

This is good advice for all the youtubers who get sucked into engaging with liars and fools. First, don’t. Second, if you must, focus one one thing instead of a thousand and drill down hard to expose the dumbass. Third, make it clear that your opponent is not a scientist, is not qualified to address the evidence, and is just a weird pretentious clown who is wasting everyone’s time.

Ugh. “Cultural Christian.” That’s an excuse for a lot of stupidity

That photo is nauseating. Elon Musk is not at all pious — he’s blatantly pandering to conservatives who are often religious. Now he’s calling himself a “cultural Christian,” a phrase I’ve heard a few times before, and never fails to make my stomach churn.

Describing himself as “cultural Christian,” Musk indicated his guiding belief goes back to that of seeking greater understanding. “That is my religion, for the lack of a better way to describe it, it’s really a religion of curiosity,” he said. “The religion of greater enlightenment.”

And then applying his First Principles mindset, Musk extrapolated that what follows from that goal is to have “consciousness expand in scale and scope” by increasing population and allowing differing perspectives. Or put differently, more babies and free speech.

Yeah, that’s short for “white nationalist”. He’s also claiming to have been a thoughtful scholar of religion…until he discovered that science fiction was a better fit.

As he grew older, Musk has said, he turned to the great religious books—the Bible, Quran, Torah, some Hindu texts—to deal with an existential crisis of meaning. And he looked to philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche.

But not until the boy discovered science fiction, he says, did he begin to find what he was looking for. In particular, he says, it was the lesson he took away from the “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” that the purpose of life wasn’t so much about finding the big answers but asking the right questions.

I don’t believe he ever read those religious texts or those philosophers, making him similar to Donald Trump. But I can believe he read Douglas Adams, although he didn’t understand him.

Elon is a perfect example of a real-life Otto.

What voting block will he piss off next?

I wouldn’t have guess the Irish, but the Irish would notice.

“Has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? ” Vance queried at a press conference held at the Milwaukee Police Association. “That’s what I’m talking about.

“We know that when we have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates,” Vance stated. “What we want is an American immigration policy that promotes assimilation.”

This is what happens when you base your policy on what movie you’ve seen. The facts are a bit different, though.

However, studies have indicated that migrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The fictional film is set in 19th-century New York and centers around a feud between rival gangs of different backgrounds. The protagonist is an Irish immigrant seeking revenge for his father’s murder, reports the Journal Sentinel.

The Danes better watch out if he ever watches The Salvation.

Or maybe he’ll center immigration policy on a viewing of Alien: Romulus.

How weird are they getting?

This weird.


Trump supporters are carrying around a pretend jar of JD Vance’s jizz to mock Democrats that are unable to conceive children, just in case anyone wonders why we think they are a cult and just plain fucking weird

Even if it’s just pretend, this is a gross concept.

In which I am entertained by the antics of economists

A trio of economists, Card, Angrist, and Imbens, won the Nobel Prize in 2021 for a natural experiment that showed that a commonly held belief about the relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment wasn’t always true. That seems reasonable to me — economics is basically about human psychology, and psychology sometimes gets strange. One strange psychological aspect of some economists, though, is that they have the notion that economics is as robustly mathematical and predictable as physics, and questioning the reliability of economics is heresy. Some economists were furious about an experiment that called their assumptions into question.

Their research didn’t conclude that an increase in the minimum wage would boost employment in every circumstance. Far from it.

But it challenged the view that an increase in the minimum wage would always lead to unemployment.

However, their findings weren’t welcomed by the establishment.

In fact, they sparked an emotional debate in the economics profession.

American economist James Buchanan, a Nobel Laureate himself (in 1986), was scathing of the suggestion that a core “law” of economics might not be universal after all.

“The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behaviour is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made,” Mr Buchanan told the Wall Street Journal in 1996.

“Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment.

“Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.

Cool. Keep in mind, Buchanan is defending economics with that statement.

Also worth keeping in mind: Buchanan was a Libertarian with a capital L, a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, and has been called The Architect of the Radical Right. But as we all know, conservative politics is totally apolitical, so his strong advocacy for ideological interests doesn’t count.

An additional comment: it turns out that considering evidence counter to dogma is the behavior of whores.

“Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.”

He sounds like a fun guy.

I guess I’m a bookburner now

Oh dear. I replied to a question on Threads, which was asking what to do with a collection of right-wing media. I suggested that it ought to be burned.

imajazzbaby: I am in a quandary. I am currently cheating clearing out my late father’s house. His red neck MAGA house. It’s actually not too bad, flags, war eagles, “United We Stand” stickers on the windows. But there’s a huge stack of Dennis Prager books. Plus the complete works of Ayn Rand 🤮
I don’t believe in burning books. But I don’t want to donate that crap and send it out into the world either.
Any ideas on what to do with them?
pzmyers: Nothing is sacred. Burn the trash. You are not saying others can’t read them (although they shouldn’t) but that you are decluttering your personal property.
I am sorry that your father had such poor taste in books. That does not mean you are obligated to propagate it.

Note: this is very different from denying others the right to read these books — no one is obligated to preserve every item a deceased parent once owned, and that includes books. I’m going to have to clean out my mother’s bookshelves, and she used to be a regular reader of books, mostly detective stories, murder mysteries, that sort of thing. They’re all getting tossed, one way or another. I know well that irrational feeling that every item the loved one touched should be preserved and passed on to generation after generation, but I don’t think my children, or my children’s children, would actually be grateful to someday inherit a few houses full of old stuff.

Here’s a completely different situation:

“Hundreds of New College of Florida library books, including many on LGBTQ+ topics and religious studies, are headed to a landfill,” Sarasota Herald Tribune reports.

“A dumpster in the parking lot of Jane Bancroft Cook Library on the campus of New College overflowed with books and collections from the now-defunct Gender and Diversity Center on Tuesday afternoon. Video captured in the afternoon showed a vehicle driving away with the books before students were notified. In the past, students were given an opportunity to purchase books that were leaving the college’s library collection.”

Purging a library of every book on certain topics is a whole ‘nother ball of wax. Traditionally, they ought to have all the jugend gathered around a bonfire.

By the way, I have a bookshelf full of truly awful creationist books, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I’d leave them to a library as a historical resource, but not if they would just check them out to readers who might consider them validated because they are in a formal collection. I’ll probably suggest that they be incinerated or placed in a landfill.

Teachers, soldiers, and women shouldn’t vote for these guys

Working hard to focus on the only electorate that counts.

Trump campaign spokesperson Caroline Sunshine said Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz “never held a real job in his life” — despite his years of teaching and serving in the National Guard.

During a Wednesday interview on Real America’s Voice, host Terrence Bates complained to Sunshine that reporters were not questioning Walz “on his repeated lies about his military service and every single other thing that seems to come out of his mouth.”

“Tim A. Walz, as I like to call him, because when Tim was asked to, you know, answer the call to service and deploy and fight for our country, he chose to step down and run for Congress,” Sunshine replied. “He’s never held a real job in his life, by the way. He spent all of his life running for Congress, running for office or in office.”

Terrible. He could have been a lawyer, or a venture capitalist, or a real estate speculator…you know, a real job. I’m ashamed to say that I’ve been a failure my whole life, ‘working’ as a teacher. My daughter is a researcher at a university, my middle son is a major in the Army, not real jobs, obviously. Fortunately, my oldest son rescues the family reputation, since he does financial stuff in a law office (don’t ask me what, I lack the ability to comprehend real labor).

As a professor, I’m not just a lazy slacker, I am the enemy.

My wife does have a productive life…oops. Nope. There’s only one thing she’s good for.

So…the Republicans are doing their best to alienate teachers, men in the military, women, and everyone in congress. Can they win the presidency on the backs of just white male lawyers who haven’t held political office?

I did not watch the Musk/Trump interview. Did you?

I’ve read a few reports about it. It started 40 minutes late; Musk blamed the technical problems on a denial-of-service attack, a peculiar one that only affected the interview and not any other service on Twitter. Can we just admit that Musk is an incompetent manager? Trump got lobbed nothing but softball questions, and delivered the same old lies. Meanwhile, Roger Stone’s email account was hacked, giving bad guys access to lots of campaign information.

All the dim duo accomplished was more mockery.

he failure to launch of Elon Musk’s planned audio live stream on X with former President Donald Trump quickly became the subject of online mockery on the very same social platform, including by the official campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

“BREAKING: Twitter,” the pro-Harris account @harris_wins posted about 20 minutes after the stream was supposed to start.

While Musk claimed the malfunction was due to a massive denial-of-service attack, other prominent X users weren’t so sure.

“so the guy who makes cars that randomly crash and burst into flames is interviewing Donald Trump, and the interview crashed and burst into flames?” wrote self-described “internet loudmouth” Jeff Tiedrich. “holy s—, how did we Nazi this coming.”

“LOL the Elon-Trump space is broken no one can get in apparently,” wrote professor and attorney Seth Abramson. “This app is a flaming poop salad.”

“I’m in the historic Musk Trump twitter space and all you can hear is heavy breathing and the occasional fart,” quipped Cyanide and Happiness co-creator Rob DenBleyker.

Novelist Paul Rudnick pondered if the interview crashed because “Trump kept talking into the remote,” or “Elon got distracted by a squirrel.”

I feel no desire to watch the recording.