The detritus of GamerGate is still washing up on our Western shores

What kind of attitude goes with a Silicon Valley tech-bro crypto-dude? You probably won’t be surprised by this:

Jesse Powell, a founder and the chief executive of Kraken, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, recently asked his employees, “If you can identify as a sex, can you identify as a race or ethnicity?”

He also questioned their use of preferred pronouns and led a discussion about “who can refer to another person as the N word.”

And he told workers that questions about women’s intelligence and risk appetite compared with men’s were “not as settled as one might have initially thought.”

Of course, being a pretentious libertarian, Mr Powell has written a philosophical manifesto for his company.

This month, Mr. Powell unveiled a 31-page culture document outlining Kraken’s “libertarian philosophical values” and commitment to “diversity of thought,” and told employees in a meeting that he did not believe they should choose their own pronouns. The document and a recording of the meeting were obtained by The Times.

He talks about valuing “diversity of thought,” but at the same time he has an “ideological purity test” for his employees. He does not seem to be aware of the contradiction, or that his company is no better than Answers in Genesis in this regard.

He also insisted that some workers subscribe to Bitcoin’s philosophical underpinnings. “We have this ideological purity test,” Mr. Powell said about the company’s hiring process on a 2018 crypto podcast. “A test of whether you’re kind of aligned with the vision of Bitcoin and crypto.”

Here’s where I get really annoyed: to defend his argument that women have inferior brains than men (because they prefer real cash over crypto junk!), he pulls out a Shapiroesque claim that he’s just talking about science and biology.

“Being offended is not being harmed,” Mr. Powell responded. “A discussion about science, biology, attempting to determine facts of the world cannot be harmful.”

I call bullshit. I hope his whole company gets sucked into a vortex of destruction as the crypto market implodes.

Would you want this guy to influence your children?

I’m curious to know which of the two individuals below you might think would be a more traumatic sight for children visiting a library story hour.

The drag queen?

The Proud Boy?

If you need a little more information to come to conclusion, what the fuck is wrong with you? Here’s the context, though.

A group of men displaying Proud Boy colors stormed a Drag Queen Story Hour at the San Lorenzo Library on Saturday afternoon shouting homophobic and transphobic threats after anti-LGBTQ online activist Chaya Raichik – who runs the anti-LGBTQ LibsofTikTok account – posted information about the event online.

The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office said that police responded to a report of a disturbance at the library at around 1:30 p.m. and discovered five men “described as members of the Proud Boys organization,” “extremely aggressive with a threatening violent demeanor causing people to fear for their safety.”

Right. So in order to “protect” the children, they charged into a children’s story hour to disrupt what should have been a quiet, friendly event with threats and abuse.

Libs of TikTok, which encourages this kind of hate, still has a Twitter account…and is also on Facebook, Parler, Truth Social, Rumble, Gab, GETTR, Instagram, and YouTube. All the social media sites participate in encouraging this kind of frenzy of conflict.

The curse of the middle-aged white man

Pity me! I’m part of the most oppressed demographic in the world! I know because my fellow middle-aged white men tell me they’re suffering.

Look! Here’s James Patterson!

James Patterson, a best-selling author with an estimated net worth of $800 million, opened up about how difficult it is for white men to find work in publishing and Hollywood.

The thriller novelist said white male writers experience “another form of racism” in an interview with The Times published Sunday, lamenting the plight of older white males. “What’s that all about?” Patterson mused. “Can you get a job? Yes. Is it harder? Yes. It’s even harder for older writers. You don’t meet many 52-year-old white males.”

It’s so hard to be a mystery writer who churns out formulaic pot-boilers that grace the shelves of every airport bookstore in the country.

And what about Christopher Eccleston?

Christopher Eccleston, star of Doctor Who, Thor: The Dark World, and The Leftovers, said in a new interview that straight white males are “the new pariahs of the industry,” though he also acknowledged that more diversity in film and television is a good thing.

In a conversation with Times Radio (via Deadline), Eccleston noted, “Quite rightly I’m a dinosaur now. I’m white, I’m middle-aged, I’m male, and I’m straight. We are all seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein et al. And I can feel that the opportunities are shrinking, as they should do.”

I love how these articles always set the stage by first telling us how many hundreds of millions of dollars they have or what movies and TV shows they starred in, before quoting their sad little whimpers. You know, this isn’t a case where these people have lost opportunities or are making less money — they’re just finding that now they might have to rub elbows with people who are not middle-aged straight white men. Patterson is correct, it is another form of racism…it’s just that the racist here is himself. Maybe it’s just the same old racism?

If we’re seen through the lens of Harvey Weinstein, though, you have to recognize that one reason is that a lot of straight white men enabled him and profited from him and tolerated his behavior.

The right heart, but too few

A small group of women disrupted (in a small way) Joel Osteen’s megachurch protesting their stance on women’s rights.

More of this. The only reason Osteen could ignore it is that there weren’t enough protesters. If you live near one of these hideous, oppressive megachurches, do try to get out now and then and let them know what you think of their ideas. They had 13 activists in the pews, they were kind of swamped out by this gigantic, opulent temple to gullibility.

Saying the quiet part out loud

This is sickening. Some of the Gender Critical assholes think they’ve achieved critical mass to begin their program of eradicating transgender people.

Helen Joyce says every person who is transgender is damaged and is a huge problem to a sane world and we’re going to have to accommodate them for 50,60,70 years, and their solution is reducing or keeping down the number of people who transition. This is some kind of Nazi shit. But she’s not being heartless, oh no! It’s for the greater good! You gotta dehumanize your target (they’re damaged), present them as a “problem”, suggest the preliminary step is to prevent them from proliferating, and then the ground will be prepared for the final solution.

I can recognize eliminationist rhetoric when I see it.

What is going on in Ohio?

The state seems to be a magnet for bad political ideas, and is striving to become the Yankee Texas. Recently, it was the extreme gerrymandering that no one wants to fix (hey, maybe political parties shouldn’t be in charge of defining districts?), and now…this new law.

If you’re unhappy that you lost a contest in high school, just accuse your opponent of being transgender, and demand a thorough investigation. Ohio Republicans will help by demanding that their pants be pulled down to inspect their genitals, followed by an invasive internal inspection, then a blood draw to have their testosterone levels measured, and a cheek swab to check out their chromosomes. FREEDOM! They’re the party that is going to get the intrusive legislation of Big Government off your backs by legislating that your school can insist on ad hoc genital, hormone, and chromosome inspections, all in the name of protecting women’s sports.

Yeah, that’s exactly what women athletes have been demanding, that others can request gynecological exams at will.

CFI disappoints me again, as expected

William had to go and remind me that CFI still exists. I used to have to roll my eyes at Ron Lindsay’s editorials, but now that Robyn Blumner is in charge, they’ve gotten even worse. Take a look at their latest: Identitarianism is incompatible with humanism. I agree with the title! But we immediately run into some problems. She starts by defining her terms (good), but her definition is insane.

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

Wait, what? Her source is Urban Dictionary? That might be find for some obscure slang, but not for a topic that a presumable rationalist is about to jump headlong into with an op-ed. Who are the people she’s addressing here? I’m confused already.

If we take a small step upwards and look at the definition on Wikipedia, it’s radically different.

The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Originating in France as Les Identitaires (“The Identitarians”), with its youth wing Generation Identity, the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Building on ontological ideas of the German Conservative Revolution, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.

Identitarians promote concepts such as pan-European nationalism, localism, ethnopluralism, remigration, or the Great Replacement, and they are generally opposed to globalisation, multiculturalism, Islamization and extra-European immigration. Influenced by New Right metapolitics, they do not seek direct electoral results, but rather to provoke long-term social transformations and eventually achieve cultural hegemony and popular adhesion to their ideas.

Some Identitarians explicitly espouse ideas of xenophobia and racialism, but most limit their public statements to more docile language. Strongly opposed to cultural mixing, they promote the preservation of homogeneous ethno-cultural entities, generally to the exclusion of extra-European migrants and descendants of immigrants. In 2019, the Identitarian Movement was classified by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremist.

By the way, it begins with an important note: “Not to be confused with Identity politics.”

Anyway, that’s what I associate with the word Identitarian, far right nationalism and ethnocentrism. Not whatever she found on Urban Dictionary. And then she starts writing, and it’s clear what she’s really targeting: it’s those danged Wokeists again, who are not Identitarians, who oppose Identitarianism, who think Identitarians are racists and fascists.

Here’s who she’s whining about.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others.

This has given rise to a corrosive cultural environment awash in controversial speakers being shouted down on college campuses; even liberal professors and newspaper editors losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; the cancellation of great historical figures for being men of their time; and a range of outlandish claims of microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other crimes against current orthodoxy.

Oh. You know, these people who hate freedom (and are probably also ugly and smell bad) don’t exist. There are people who object when some people promote objectionable ideas. The humanists I know with ‘radical’ ideas about justice, for instance, don’t see simple discrete categories that deserve special protection, they see everyone as unique, with variations that ought to be respected and not judged through the lens of “good” and “bad” or “superior” and “inferior”, and insist that no one deserves to be singled out with a simplistic label. Everything about culture and experience and biology contributes to identity, and you don’t get to erase it. Blumner is taking the familiar “I don’t see color” claim of the privileged and trying to white every variation out.

Humanism should not reduce everyone to generic plastic people. It should recognize the variety of social forces that shape us all and make us each different. That’s not identitarianism, it’s a basic recognition of the diversity of human experience. She should have ended the essay with this:

There are a couple of tells in her complaint. losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; who is she to decide what is a tiny slight? Some of those slights are long historical slanders that have deeply harmed people! men of their time; there’s a poisonous phrase, suggesting that it was OK for slavers, for instance, to oppress and torture other human beings because, well, everyone else was doing it. There are humanist principles that are the next best thing to universal, and ‘treat others as you would want to be treated’ is one of them, and once, I would have thought, central to humanist thinking. And then, current orthodoxy. Is the status quo and orthodoxy something atheists and humanists necessarily support?

Then, who are the victims of this corrosive cultural environment? Name them. Give specific examples. As it stands, this is just bad essay writing, showing that she’s afraid if she did get specific, someone might track down the examples and find that the slights weren’t so tiny, that other men and women of their time were quite vocal about the wrongs they were doing, or that the microaggressions were severe enough that everyone should know better. And she’s right to be afraid, because she does name one person, and her motivations are clear.

Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the American Humanist Association (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like.

Oh, yes, keep in mind that Robyn Blumner was appointed to her position by Richard Dawkins, and that she is the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Conflict of interest much?

It was more than one tweet, and it exposed that he had a bigoted perspective on those transgender issues. It is correct that the American Humanist Association didn’t like the idea of having given a distinguished award to a bigot, and one who has gone on to consistently take the wrong side in every matter of trans rights. He just recently got together with Jordan Peterson in a mutual back-patting session to say that he “totally agrees” with him that those transgenders are oppressing good wealthy white cis-het men like themselves. That wasn’t some trivial slip of the tongue, it’s what Dawkins actively believes and promotes, so why should AHA ignore an ethical violation like that?

But then, Blumner, and by association, CFI, have a crude and biased understanding of gender issues themselves. The clue is in the image they chose to illustrate the essay.

Get it? It would be unnatural to plug your VGA port and a USB cable together. Used to illustrate an article defending the primitive and simplistic views of a man on gender issues. The subtext is not very sub.

She might as well have illustrated it with this.

I was silent

Could he look more like a sleazy dirtbag? Maybe that’s what they mean by “authentic.”

To make excuses for myself, it was a court case, and my perspective wouldn’t have made a difference — I’d have just been one of the thousands or more yammering on the internet about a trial. I’d been through this before, in the OJ Simpson case, where the cacophony of noise did not contribute to justice, but almost certainly skewed the fickle court of public opinion in unfavorable ways.

I’m speaking of the Amber Heard trial, which was decided yesterday in favor of Johnny Depp. I’ve avoided news of the case because enough snippets had leaked through to leave me sickened. On YouTube and social media, it was made clear that Depp was the affable rogue who made light of Heard’s case; Heard, on the other hand, was the conniving sociopath who could turn on the waterworks at an instant’s notice, and then, moments later, revert to stone-faced heartless bitch. Obviously, she was lying. Obviously, Captain Jack Sparrow was a misunderstood rascal.

Except…whenever I watched a clip of the trial, what I saw was a woman in pain, controlling herself because she didn’t want to play into the public perception of women as hysterical, while Depp was just an asshole. Even more poisonous was the Depp camp, which seemed to consist largely of the usual bros who were gleeful about an opportunity to shriek insults at a woman while not getting the usual social opprobrium. It was a repulsive spectacle. While I averted my eyes and avoided the trial news as much as I could, Rebecca Watson dug deeper, and I agree fully with her take.

Now the case has been settled. Depp won. This is going to have serious consequences.

…on Wednesday after a jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found Amber Heard guilty of defaming Depp in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she identified herself as a public face of domestic abuse survivors, without explicitly naming Depp. Despite presenting photos of her injuries, video recordings of Depp’s meltdowns, and witness testimony supporting her claims of abuse, Depp was awarded $10 million plus $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million for winning one point in her countersuit.

But in truth, the highly publicized trial was decided in the court of public opinion weeks ago. As it played out over the last few weeks, with people on social media overwhelmingly aligning with the beloved Pirates of the Caribbean star, millions of stans and even brands and celebrities have excoriated Heard and accused her of fabricating the allegations against Depp, causing hashtags like #AmberTurd and #JusticeForJohnnyDepp to trend worldwide.

“This is basically the end of MeToo,” Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the death of the whole movement.”

As the verdict came in, sexual assault survivors expressed their disappointment with the decision, even if they were not surprised by it. “I don’t think it’s unexpected. But it’s horrible,” says one survivor, who herself faced a defamation claim after coming forward against her own abuser (and requested her name be withheld for legal reasons). She says the claim was dropped, but that watching Heard be dragged through the mud during the trial brought back memories of her own experience, which she says was traumatic and led her to consider suicide.

“I feel really glad to think my case didn’t go ahead. And stupid to think I could have won it,” she says. “Men always win.”

And I kept my mouth shut throughout. I’m always disappointing myself.

Rebecca didn’t mention the one case that impressed me with her point, that I mentioned at the beginning: the “trial of the century”, the OJ Simpson murder trial, which OJ won, because “Men always win.” Even after brutally chopping up Nicole Brown Simpson, he got off.

Well, sort of.

We all knew he did it, and his behavior after the trial confirmed it. His career in movies was dead, and you can’t even watch his old movies anymore without cringing deeply. I’m sure not going to watch a Naked Gun movie, ever again. It’s a similar situation now; knowing that Johnny Depp is a wife-beating arrogant dudebro means I’m not going to ever be able to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or any movie starring Depp, without feeling a little bit of disgust at the main character.

Not that that could be the slightest consolation to Amber Heard or especially Nicole Brown Simpson. At least Heard has escaped without being stabbed to death. This verdict makes it a little less likely that other victims of domestic abuse will get away with their lives.

Slippery slope to stupid

This woman is deeply, painfully stupid.


She seems to think there is some biological trend. There isn’t. Heterosexuality will always be common, and so will homosexuality.

Except, here’s the future liberals want: everyone is free to choose whom to love without shame or punishment. Kids are free to explore who they want to be, without their church or the government dictating which subset of the populace they are allowed to form loving relationships with; boys can love boys, boys can love girls, girls can love girls, girls can love boys, boys can be girls, girls can be boys, and if they don’t find fulfillment in sexual relationships, they can do something else. All the people who get pregnant will be those who want babies. Families will come in all flavors, and no one will find it at all unusual, let alone want to tell other people how they are supposed to live.

I think it would be absolutely wonderful if no one were “straight” anymore, in the Marjorie Taylor Greene sense of the word: compelled to live in a narrow little box, no matter what their heart tells them. That does not imply that heterosexuality will be discouraged or punished, although the MJTs of the world will always project and think that what they do to minorities is what will happen to them.

What kind of sicko goes to a Bill Maher show?

(I apologize in advance. The previous post was all about cat vomit, and now this one is all about Bill Maher. It’s all getting worse and worse, isn’t it?)

Imagine you are a liberal, of the waffling center right type. You’ve got a good middle class job, maybe you’re in management or you own a tire store. You don’t like Trump at all, because he’s rocking the boat and you really, really want the boat to stay on its current course. You also really dislike AOC and those far left extremists for the same reason. You like to watch Bill Maher because he dresses like a well-off banker, looks like a Republican, talks like a Republican, but reassures you frequently that he’s really liberal, just like you. He invites guests on his show from a wide spectrum of political perspectives–well, the fun ones are always right-wing buffoons– which is how you think “balance” works. The status quo is in good hands with Maher. He also isn’t very bright, just like you, so you can trust him to normalize all your vague notions about how the world works.

You score tickets to his show. You know what’s expected of you — you’re going to whoop and holler at his jokes, which is easy to do: when he pauses and looks smugly at the audience, that’s when you laugh, even if what he just said isn’t particularly clever or insightful. You’re in luck tonight, because he delivers a monologue catering to your vague unease about sexuality. You get to watch the old fart mock the queers, in the name of his version of science.

He gets off with a great start, playing on the audience’s ignorance. There are more openly gay people now than there were in previous generations, an increasing number of Americans are willing to identify as LGBTQ now. Invoke the slippery slope fallacy: therefore, we’ll all be gay in 2053.

Long pause. Smile smarmily. Audience goes wild.

I’m just saying, when things change this much, this fast, people are allowed to ask what’s up with that?

Yeah, Bill, but we know you won’t ask the right questions. The way things used to be are assumed to be right and proper; don’t question the evidence of generations of oppression, just suggest that there’s something wrong with people nowadays being comfortable with who they are, and imply that the numbers suggest that there’s a mass conversion going on.

His next ‘joke’: the ACLU said that abortion bans disproportionately harm certain people. He then borrows the outrage of Fox News and Helen Lewis by claiming that the list left off women. It didn’t. Here’s the tweet:

Uh, Bill: every single one of those bullet points is about the effect on people. Women are people. So are trans men. The list is about groups of people who are most affected by the bans, and the point is that wealthy Republican white women aren’t going to feel the pain, but all these groups that are already marginalized by society will. The clue is that this is an “urgent matter of racial and economic justice.” Abortion rights are human rights, you know.

He’s reciting TERFy biases when he claims that the ACLU won’t use the word “woman”. They do. They also point out that the abortion bans have broad effects that will harm plenty of other people. Bill looks at that list and somehow, annoyingly uses it as an excuse to chide gay people and say, not everything is about you. Yeah, Bill, we can read, unlike you.

Can he get even more TERFy? Of course he can. “The children!” he cries. They’re experimenting on children! His source: Abigail Shrier, in Irreversible Damage. We all knew he was a quack from his bizarre opinions about vaccines, but I guess he’s even more deeply into quackery now.

Are we done yet? Nope. His next joke is to chastise the NYC pride march, because they’ve selected 4 trans people and a lesbian as their parade marshals; where are the gay men, he querulously asks. Has he considered the fact that you can be trans and gay at the same time? No, of course not. The NYC Pride March has explained their criteria:

“At a time when LGBTQIA+ people are under increased attack, the NYC Pride March is a beacon of hope and community,” Manek said in an emailed statement. “Our grand marshals for this year truly embody the spirit of the theme for NYC Pride 2022, ‘Unapologetically Us.’ They have embraced their identities and used their platforms to help members of our community truly love and live their truth without fear or shame.”

“Gets the approval of a TERF named Bill Maher” isn’t one of them.

Then he gets to echo Shrier and claim that we’re seeing more trans people because it’s trendy. They’re just doing it to shock and challenge their parents. They’re doing it for the “likes”. If we don’t admit that some places have more LGBT people because it’s trendy, then it’s not a serious science-based discussion — hearing Maher claim the mantle of being “science-based” is rather revolting.

The rest is all one-liners based on assumptions that no one takes gender reassignment surgery seriously, with accompanying guffaws from the idiots in the audience.

I do have to address one more point though. This one:

If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.

I see that “science-based” Bill Maher takes genetic determinism for granted. What do you mean, “all biological”? Culture also shapes biology (and vice versa). The reason it is regional is that there are cultural differences as well as biological biases. The most likely explanation is that the Midwest is more conservative and is shaming kids. Surprise, Bill: more open societies aren’t pressuring kids to become trans — I think you’d be hard pressed to find a single instance of parents forcing their kids to be gay or trans, but you’ll find plenty of conservatives threatening to disown or even kill children who don’t conform to their cis and heterosexual pattern. But Maher isn’t calling them out — that’s his audience of yahoos.

The science-based position is that your sexual preferences and identity is the result of an interplay between genetics and environment. No one claims it is all biological, but that you can’t separate biology from culture and experience.

I’ve long accepted that Maher is a bigoted ignoramus, but what bothers me most is that laugh track of an audience howling at “jokes” that are nothing more than prejudice with a smirk, and those frequent cuts to his panel guests who are smiling and laughing at his horrid punch lines. That’s what I’d expect from an Adam Corolla, but jeezus, Donna Brazile, why did you accept the invitation to appear on this disgrace of a show?