The Tom Perkins system

He has opened his mouth again. Tom Perkins, the privileged, overpaid rich guy who thinks the wealthy in America are as oppressed as the Jews under the Third Reich, has an ideal democratic system.

The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get the vote if you don’t pay a dollar in taxes. But what I really think is it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes. How’s that?

Wait, why base votes on money? There’s an assumption there that what we value in citizens is their income.

Here’s the PZ Myers system: You don’t get the vote if you don’t graduate from high school. You get an extra vote for every year of graduate and post-graduate work at an accredited institution. Professors get an extra vote for every year post-tenure. (I am JOKING. This would be a horrible system.)

The Heinlein system: You don’t get the vote if you don’t serve at least four years in the military. You get an extra vote for every military rank above private that you achieve.

The compensation system: You get one vote for every day served in prison while innocent. You get 5 votes every time the police beat you while peacefully protesting. Every year that you work full time but get paid below the poverty level, you get an extra vote.

The albedo system: Instruments are used at the polling places to measure the albedo of your forehead, and all votes are scaled by that value. Might as well institutionalize it, right? And make it sciencey!

The nerd system: We develop an index that takes into account the number of Magic:The Gathering cards you own, the level of your D&D character, the bulk tonnage of your comic book collection, and your high score at Call of Duty/Harvest Moon, and use that to determine how many votes you get.

The astrological system: Point values are assigned to the zodiac signs. Pisces, of course, get the highest number of votes. Just because we’re the best.

The physiological system: Your erythrocyte count, sampled at the polling station, is multiplied by 1 for type O, 2 for type A or B, and 3 for type AB blood. Finally, cell surface glycoproteins get representation!

The young male system: Everyone gets into a pissing contest each year. You get a number of votes equal to the number of feet your stream reaches.

I’m sure there are other arbitrary vote weighting schemes you can come up with…and then we can vote on which is the best using some other vote weighting scheme!

Sometimes even the old white guys get it

This old white guy is also from Texas, and he’s a sportscaster, yet somehow in one fabulous speech he manages to put the whole Michael Sam story into perspective.


You beat a woman and drag her down a flight of stairs, pulling her hair out by the roots? You’re the fourth guy taken in the NFL draft. You kill people while driving drunk? That guy’s welcome. Players caught in hotel rooms with illegal drugs and prostitutes? We know they’re welcome. Players accused of rape and pay the woman to go away? You lie to police, trying to cover up a murder? We’re comfortable with that.
You love another man? Well, now you’ve gone too far!

Good work, Dale Hansen!

Everything you need to know about Bob Jones University

They intentionally turn a blind eye to their sins.

For decades, students at Bob Jones University who sought counseling for sexual abuse were told not to report it because turning in an abuser from a fundamentalist Christian community would damage Jesus Christ. Administrators called victims liars and sinners.

But wait! Then they hired a Christian consulting group to independently help them grapple with the problem. That’s a step in the right direction.

But wait again! Now they’ve fired their consultants, because they were going beyond the originally outlined intentions, that is, they were coming up with criticisms and answers they didn’t like.

This is how BJU handles assault complaints.

Erin Burchwell said that when she accused a university employee of sexually assaulting her in the late 1990s, “their idea of an investigation and counseling was to ask me what I was wearing and whether it was tight, and to tell me not to talk to anyone about it because it wouldn’t look good for me.” She said university officials alternated between “saying it never even happened and saying I was a willing participant.”

I doubt that I have many readers among the student body at BJU, but in case there are any, here’s my advice: get out while you can. Transfer to a real college.

Happy Darwin Day!

Charles_and_Catherine_Darwin,_1816,_by_Sharples

I thought I’d include a picture of the young Charles Darwin, since we are celebrating his birthday today. That’s him in 1816, when he was 6 or 7 years old, with his younger sister, Emily Catherine Darwin. And then I started wondering about that other person in the picture. Darwin’s sisters were an extremely important influence on his life, and I don’t know a heck of a lot about her; Darwin had four sisters and one brother, Erasmus, and most of the biographies say quite a bit about the older brother who preceded him to university, but the sisters seem to be background noise. It seems Catherine’s life was mainly about caring for her father’s household, and she married late in life, at age 53, only to die a few years later. You can read some of Catherine’s correspondence, and she seems to have been a lively and intelligent person.

According to Darwin’s autobiography, she was also the smart one.

I have been told that I was much slower in learning than my younger sister Catherine, and I believe that I was in many ways a naughty boy. Caroline was extremely kind, clever and zealous; but she was too zealous in trying to improve me; for I clearly remember after this long interval of years, saying to myself when about to enter a room where she was-“What will she blame me for now?” and I made myself dogged so as not to care what she might say.

Roughly the same age, roughly the same intelligence, but Catherine Darwin didn’t have the opportunity to go to college or to sail on the Beagle. It makes the picture even more interesting: foreground and background, different fates, different choices, different chances. We know what will happen to those two children — Darwin will die in 1882, Catherine in 1866 — history does this odd thing of telescoping complex lives into just a few events, and I don’t know, but it makes me sad.

I am now resisting the temptation to pull out the old photos of my kids from that box in the closet.

My wife has enslaved me! She wants sex without babies!

The best part of this interview with James Taranto is watching the expressions of the women doing the interviewing. You can tell they’re struggling to maintain a professional attitude while dealing with this lunatic hunk of slime.

The social purpose of marriage is to control men.

I’m actually quite fond of women. You can call me Tarantosaurus sex.

Women can have sex without the fear of pregnancy, just like men can. And this is a bad thing?

Excuse me. I have to go drink a quart of epicac right now. I could just go read the Wall Street Journal, I suppose, but guzzling a potent emetic would have the same effect, and be less painful to my brain.

(via TBogg.)

Enid, Oklahoma: Where the Great Whites Gather

Gary’s Chicaro, a restaurant in Enid, is a Nigger-Free Zone — it says so right on their official t-shirt. It also prohibits faggots and welfare queens.

It’s been in business for 44 years.

It’s finally making the news because a white guy, Matt Gard, was denied service — he’s in a wheelchair. See, they also hate the handicapped! I am cynically amused, though, by the fact that the white-guy whistleblower was a regular at the restaurant for years, and only woke up to the nastiness of the place when it finally affected him directly.

The article on the Daily Kos about Gary’s Chicaro also sets up another contrast: it quotes from libertarians who argue that we don’t need civil rights laws imposing the heavy hand of the government, because the Magic Power of the Marketplace would shut down racist establishments that exclude a significant fraction of their customer base.

Still in business after 44 years, while serving only healthy heterosexual white men with jobs — good ol’ boys. In this way is libertarianism refuted.

Academic Mansplaining

Paige West has some excellent examples of mansplaining in 2013. She’s an expert in New Guinea culture, and it’s amazing how many men take the time to explain to her how New Guinea works.

But the best part, I think, is that the very first comment, from someone signing himself “Male Academic”, takes pains to explain at length that maybe this isn’t actually sexism. He’s obliviously mansplaining!

Let me just say that I, a man, have given a great many lectures in the past year, and I have had people disagree with me, sometimes vigorously, and I have had people add informed perspectives from their own expertise, but I have never had anyone treat me as a callow, infantile know-nothing who needed remedial instruction in my own field of expertise.

That would only happen if I had breasts sucking all the intelligence out of my skull, apparently.

Blow it out your ass, Sam Zell

That title is the mildest phrase that ran through my mind listening to billionaire real estate investor whining about how the rich are so fucking persecuted.

The one percent work harder, the one percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society

Good god. I’d like to introduce Sam Zell to my father, who spent most of his life living well below the poverty line, working overtime just to bring in enough money to feed his kids. He spent his years working with heavy machinery all day long (or sometime all night long, when he was stuck on a night shift); he would come home with hands caked with grease and oil, his back aching, often barely able to move until he had to rise for the next shift. He didn’t have a nice suit. He didn’t get to go out to expensive restaurants for over-priced meals. He didn’t fly first class everywhere — he didn’t fly anywhere, period.

And this smug asshole declares that he works so much harder than everyone else; that my father earned $10,000/year while Sam Zell gets billions because that’s what they deserve.

I’d like to introduce him to my father, but I can’t, because years of hard labor as a blue-collar grunt had their toll, and he’s dead.

Keep opening your mouths, you privileged coddled rich fuckwads. Marie Antoinette had nothing on the American upper class. If there is a revolution, what’s going to drive it is the arrogance of these parasites.

Another fine American export

The Olympics have always been political, always been tied to the nationalist aspirations of the host country. Always. Even when they are hosted in relatively benign countries, we should be wary of this attempt to hijack what ought to be simply an international athletic event into propaganda. (It’s not just the Olympics, either; what is it with people that they have to turn every sport into a municipal or regional battle, even when the athletes are basically mercenaries hired to represent Seattle or Detroit or Green Bay?)

But these Russian Olympics are something special. What if a country decided to show off by hosting an international event, and then all they managed to show off was incompetence, corruption, and hatred? Because, man, the Sochi Olympics are going to go down in the history books. Maybe they’ll pull out all the stops and get the hotels built in time; maybe they’ll be able to paper over the graft that’s used to get things done; but one thing they will not be able to hide, because they’re trying so hard to make it official policy, is their persecution of gay people.

Jeff Sharlet visited Russia, and came back with harrowing first-person accounts of assault and torture and abuse, as well as a description of how the apparatus of the state is being used to implement oppression.

The Russian closet has always been deep, but since last June, when the Duma began passing laws designed to shove Russia’s tiny out population back into it, the closet has been getting darker. The first law banned gay "propaganda," but it was written so as to leave the definition vague. It’s a mechanism of thought control, its target not so much gays as anybody the state declares gay; a virtual resurrection of Article 70 from the old Soviet system, forbidding "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Then, as now, nobody knew exactly what "propaganda" was. The new law explicitly forbids any suggestion that queer love is equal to that of heterosexuals, but what constitutes such a suggestion? One man was charged for holding up a sign that said being gay is ok. Pride parades are out of the question, a pink triangle enough to get you arrested, if not beaten. A couple holding hands could be accused of propaganda if they do so where a minor might see them; the law, as framed, is all about protecting the children. Yelena Mizulina, chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women, and Children’s Affairs and the author of the bill, says that it’s too late to save adult "homosexualists," as they’re called, but Russia still has a chance to raise a pure generation.

Meanwhile, something strange is happening in the US, that bastion of Cold War virtue. Our right wing, which used to hate all things Russian as a matter of reflex, has begun to warm to them: they’ve found common ground at last. I’d say it was kind of sweet, except that that common ground seems to be built on the desire to dig mass graves for gay people. Bryan Fischer, for instance, praises Russia for ahead of us on recognizing that it’s a moral evil to propagandize this lifestyle among teenagers..

We don’t get to stand and wag fingers at Russia, though, because they’re actually just holding up a mirror to us. As Sharlet continues, it’s American Christian Evangelicals who have been fanning the flames around the world.

Mizulina’s dream isn’t old-fashioned; it is, as one fascist supporter told me, "utopian." He meant that as praise. And the Russian dream is not alone. Liberal Americans imagine LGBT rights as slowly but surely marching forward. But queer rights don’t advance along a straight line. In Russia and throughout Eastern Europe—and in India and in Australia, in a belt across Central Africa—anti-gay crusaders are developing new laws and sharpening old ones. The ideas, meanwhile, are American: the rhetoric of "family values" churned out by right-wing American think tanks, bizarre statistics to prove that evil is a fact, its face a gay one. This hatred is old venom, but its weaponization by nations as a means with which to fight "globalization"—not the economic kind, the human-rights kind—is a new terror.

“Family values.” I think families are great, I think we don’t pay enough attention to values or ideals — these are the conceptual tools human beings used to set aspirations, and they’re important. But probably the most effective hijacking ever done in my lifetime was this cunning subordination of “family” to be a synonym for intolerance, hyper-masculinity, and sexual oppression of all kinds. It’s impressive how the right wing has taken a word so fundamental to healthy human living, “family”, and managed to poison it so thoroughly.

And here it is, exposed for all to see in Sochi. The country has been infiltrated by American “Family Values” warriors, and what we’re going to see in the Olympics (if you bother to watch them) is our right wing American utopia.

These pernicious strategies are personified by one man, Scott Lively (but let’s not make the mistake of thinking he’s the source — he’s just one eruption our of a whole pimply infection of swarms of conservative evangelicals). Lively’s mission in life has been to spread his homophobia world-wide. He’s been an inspiration for anti-gay legislation in both Africa and Eastern Europe, and he’s proud of it.

He’s currently been targeted for criminal prosecution in the US under the Alien Tort Statute — it turns out that foreign victims of American abuse actually do have legal recourse here, and there are a lot of dead and maimed bodies that can be laid on Lively’s doorstep. We can only hope that justice is done.

Meanwhile, about that mirror reflecting America’s role in spreading hate…Scott Lively is running for governor of Massachusetts as a candidate who can clearly and unapologetically articulate Biblical values without fear or compromise. Remember that when you scorn Russia.