Turn off the bat-signal, he’s gone.
The best time to watch Batman is when you’re 9 years old and spending the night with your grandma and uncle, drinking pop and eating ice cream. I guess that’s gone now, too.
YouTube has made a serious mistake. They usually try to pretend to be above all the petty bickering going on in their medium, intervening only when “objective” criteria are violated, but they slipped and openly ignored their own rules in the case of popular asshole, Steven Crowder. He’s been spewing bigoted bullshit for as long as he’s had a channel, and one could argue that that is the source of his popularity. Now, though, when he’s called on his use of incessant racial and gay slurs, YouTube punted.
Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video "debunking" Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity. Here's a sample: pic.twitter.com/UReCcQ2Elj
— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) May 31, 2019
I don’t know what to say.
@YouTube has decided not to punish Crowder, after he spent two years harassing me for being gay and Latino.I don't know what to say. https://t.co/EFvWCNvPms
— Carlos Maza (@gaywonk) June 4, 2019
To add to the irony, it’s Pride Month, and YouTube has put up their logo in rainbow colors…while the constant assault against LGBTQ creators is in full flood, unchecked by any rules or authority.
“I think controversy and the very aggressive communities that can exist similar to Crowder, I think that drives engagement, and that drives views, and that drives advertising revenue,” he said.
YouTube, Amer said, knows exactly what it’s doing.
“When you have a platform like YouTube does, you have a choice. You can make the world a better place or you can manipulate it to make as much money as possible, and YouTube is staunchly in the place of making as much money as possible,” they said.
Is anyone surprised? That’s always been the goal of the companies that dominate social media. They aren’t altruistic in the slightest.
However, the decision to support only combative content isn’t the only way to make money, it’s just the easiest, least mindful way. It’s the same decision made by proponents of reality TV; why put any effort into quality writing, good production values, or interesting and educational content when you can throw a couple of idiots in an arena, prod them a bit, and people will contentedly watch them flail at each other?
Last Friday, I went to the doctor for a few minor complaints: tinnitus and a painfully spastic trapezius muscle. I got drugs! Cetirizine to shut down those spring allergies that might be worsening the tinnitus, and cyclobenzaprine for the muscle pains. Like a good boy, I took them exactly as prescribed over the weekend.
I don’t know whether I’m just peculiarly sensitive to them, or whether there was some major synergy between the two, but that was a totally lost weekend. Both say “may cause drowsiness”…I was constantly fading out and falling asleep, and I got little done. The cyclobenzaprine warns of “dry mouth”, and I was totally parched, dry mouth, dry adenoids, dry throat, dry vocal cords. I creaked when I talked. So I stopped on Sunday, figuring that hearing cicadas everywhere I go and having my chest spasm every time I coughed or laughed was less of a bother than the drugs.
Unfortunately, it’s taking a while for them to clear from the system. Here it is Wednesday and I’ve still got dry mouth (although it’s easing) and my eyes are still a bit blurry, and I’ll probably have to take a nap later today. At least I know these drugs are potent, they’re maybe just a tad too much for what ails me. I’ll keep ’em around in case I feel the urge to have the most boring party in the universe.
I saw the new movie, and it was classic stuff: ever more gigantic monsters trample on cities, while po-faced humans project their gnomic interpretations of the monsters’ intents on them, and while the monsters thrash at each other and go “GROOONK” as they stand atop rubble. If that’s all you need, you’ll enjoy it. It brought back memories of old Saturday matinees with Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah, all awful, but all marching through the same schtick, just like this one.
What did Boston do to deserve to be the locus of monster destruction, though?
Here’s a site calling itself “A People Map of the US, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.” It’s a concept that might have some promise, except that instead you discover a list of celebrities in politics, movies, and most of all, sports, where the connection to the location is often extraordinarily tenuous. For example, here’s my region of West Central Minnesota.
I didn’t recognize any name, except Westrom — he’s the Republican representative for my district, I can’t stand him, but it’s fair that his name is up there. For Morris, on the other hand, it’s some guy named Aaron Schock. I never heard of him. He’s never in any of the local papers. I looked him up, and learn that he was born here and moved to Illinois at a young age. So what is he famous for?
Schock resigned from Congress in March 2015 amid a scandal involving his use of public and campaign funds. A subsequent congressional ethics investigation “revealed that he used taxpayer money to fund lavish trips and events”. In November 2016, a federal grand jury indicted him in connection with the scandal. After he pled not guilty, prosecutors reached an agreement with him in March 2019 whereby all charges against him were dropped. As part of the deal, Schock’s campaign committee, Schock for Congress, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of failing to properly report expenses.
He got into Wikipedia for being a crooked politician, and the Wikipedia entry mentions where he was born, and that’s it. Now this map tars the town with him, because it has such sloppy criteria for inclusion.
Oh, well. Take a look at your hometown, maybe you’ll be lucky and discover some worthy who actually has some substantial connection to the place. Probably not, though.
I went off to my doctor’s appointment a short while ago. Buckets of blood were drawn. Many tests were made. I was dismayed at the results.
I’m fine. My physiology and biochemistry are in perfect harmony. Blood pressure is good. No debris from ruptured organs flowing through my bloodstream. Eosinophils are up a bit; I’m probably having an allergic reaction to spring, which may account for the tinnitis. I probably just pulled a muscle in my back. Go home, take an antihistamine, live for a few more decades.
Disappointing. I always go in to these things expecting I’m experiencing symptoms of my imminent doom, that they’ll discover some terrible catastrophe waiting to finally destroy me, and they always let me down.
At least I have something to look forward to. Someday I’ll get checked out and they’ll tell me my organs are imploding! My spleen is leaking! I’ve got brain rot! All my tissues are sloughing off my bones! I’ve got cartilage cancer! I shall receive the news with grim satisfaction, and inform them that I knew I was right, I’ve been telling you young whippersnappers this for 60 years, about time you pulled your heads out of your butts and figured it out. Then my head will fall off with a smug smile on my face.
I miss the ocean.
I broke down and made a doctor’s appointment for this morning. It’s nothing serious, but I’ve had this nagging back ache, this deep-down soreness between my ribs that hurts horribly when I twist just so. Normally, I’d ignore it and just enjoy my misery, but yesterday someone made me laugh and I discovered that the pain doesn’t like that at all. I started to laugh and the whole left side of my chest spasmed, so that what came out was something between a gasp, a snort, and a scream — something like “HaGNORTeeeeeeeeee“, which was terribly embarrassing. Once the word gets out, I was afraid people would start coming around to tell me jokes.
I can tell you because you’re all thousands of miles away and aren’t going to show up at my door with a knock-knock joke. There are advantages to isolation.
Also, I’ve got to mention to her this ‘noxious tinnitis thing. It’s getting worse. Right now I’m treating it with loud music, like the Led Zeppelin howling away in the background here at home. Hey, maybe I can treat the aching ribs by never laughing ever again?
Also, I’m cranky all the time.
Yeah, I’m goin’ to the doctor to ask if she’s got a cure for getting old yet.
As you sit on your throne, savoring your power, a beautiful woman comes before you.
“I have been searching the kingdom, and have found a gift for you,” she says. She lays an army of spiders at your feet.
You gasp with joy. “Exactly what I wanted! What boon can I grant you in return?”
She looks deeply into your eyes. Her full lips part, and she says, achingly, “There is but one thing I desire most of all…”
Eagerly, “Yes?”
“A soufflé.”
“A soufflé? You mean for dinner?”
“Yes. I crave your soufflé.”
You are taken aback. Your kingdom is small, little more than a snug hovel. You have no servants. You have never in your life made a soufflé. You’re not quite sure how to make such a thing.
What do you say?
I should be linking to others on FtB more often — there’s good stuff here. I just take it for granted that you’re all looking at the groovy stuff on the sidebar, as I am, so I’ll just mention a few things that jumped out at me this morning.
Of course, if you understand the theory of evolution, you realize his claim is likely to be utter nonsense. Abstract thinking is not a black-white thing; it’s a range of capabilities that, even among people, we see a huge variation in. Any capability with huge variation is subject to selection, and so it can evolve. Since people are descended from earlier ape-like creatures, it is quite believable that non-human animals would also display the ability for abstract thought, in varying degrees. And they do! Ethologists, who actually study this kind of thing, disagree with Egnor. (Also see baboons and crows, to name just a couple more examples.)
Hey, I know my cat is cunningly scheming all the time. She’s lying on a futon next to me right now, and she has all kinds of strategems for tricking me into serving her desires.
You’ve probably heard that the NY Times has been fluffing Hope Hicks, who has been subpoenaed to testify about her former employer, the Trump administration. According to Maggie Haberman, apparently the decision to comply is an “existential question” which can only be answered with some flattering portrait photography. I have a better answer to that question: ask your lawyer, and do what they say. They’ll tell you that noncompliance isn’t an option. This has been a short answer to a stupid question.
Unfortunately, that the “newspaper of record” even considers this a worthy question tells us that the NY Times is not on the side of the people.
The anti-democratic limits on acceptable discourse accepted and propounded by the Times must be opposed. The Times and Haberman and her editors are not worthless. Ignoring the Times is not a principled and logical and effective way to deal with their anti-democratic trolling. Instead, the Times must be countered each and every time they embrace the ideology of an accountability-free elite. We must never forget that the Times isn’t portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers working to divine the best possible response to problems of Gordian convolution and unsolvability. The upper ranks of the Times (including Haberman and her editors) are portraying the Trump administration as wise and sympathetic philosophers because they, too, believe themselves better off in a world without accountability for the US elite.
It’s easy to condemn Fox News as a propaganda organ for the Republicans. It’s distressing to see that the NY Times is, too.
The latest controversy that is roiling the atheist community is that a YouTuber, Rationality Rules, made a video about transgender athletes that was a seething mass of boiling bullshit — it was wrong on the facts, made up “facts”, cited Joe Rogan as an authority, and made a sweeping (and false) conclusion that women’s sports were about to be overwhelmed by a horde of Y-chromosomes taking hormone replacement therapy so that they could pwn the little ladies and win trophies. It was blatant nonsense, demolished Rationality Rules cultivated perception of being a ‘scientific’ observer, and even he was forced to admit that he got some things wrong, although he’s been slow to confess to specifics. The Atheist Community of Austin, which had recently had him on The Atheist Experience, made a statement repudiating his transphobic comments, and that’s when the shit hit the fan.
Another deep rift has formed, between the people who can clearly see the glaring transphobia in Rationality Rules’ video, and those who have decided that this must be overlooked and forgiven because, dang, he’s such a good atheist defender of reason.
Oh, jesus, we’ve been here before. Somehow being right about one thing, the nonexistence of gods, means you must be right about everything, especially if you hold poisonously regressive views.
Anyway, HJ Hornbeck tries to summarize the chaos (there’s more than one video, an apology video, all kinds of vehement denials everywhere), and he’s right that there is one clear conclusion: Rationality Rules made lots of transphobic statements and assumptions. If you’re arguing against that crystal-clear fact, you ought to turn in your Official Skeptical Atheist card. If you’re arguing that such attitudes are acceptable, please stay on your side of the rift.
