Do I really want to see another comic book movie?

I have mixed feelings about these things. They kind of suck the air out of the room — how many superhero movies will be dominating the theaters this summer? I like the gigantic ensemble movies least of all, since they always feel overblown and crowded, and they replace interesting character development with simply trotting out yet another colorful costume. They’re great big telenovellas about luchadors…which could be fun, I admit, like having ice cream and cookies for dinner, but they’ll kill you eventually if that’s the only thing in your diet.

I’m still planning on seeing Avengers: Endgame tonight, with my wife. Which reminds me — another unpleasantness is that I’m going to have to explain the story to her first, since she doesn’t pay much attention to these things, and they always sound so ridiculous. “In the last movie, big purple bad guy collected a bunch of magic rocks that gave him the power to snap his fingers and make half the people in the universe disappear, because he thinks that will make life better for the survivors. In this movie, a few dozen surviving people in spandex will try to undo the purple guy’s magic.” This will not sound promising.

But Tony Thompson convinced me. People have emotional connections to these stories, to grand elaborate stories in general, and a lot of people love this series of movies. I’m willing to bask in the afterglow of the audience for a connection to that, even if my brain is going to be picking nits throughout it. I can find vicarious enjoyment of other people’s enjoyment, so even if I find a thousand annoyances in this movie, I’ll be able to take something away from it.

Also, I’m hoping Thor will find a way to resurrect Loki.

Comic-book movies treat arachnophobia!

Good news, everybody! We can reduce arachnophobia with just a seven second clip from a Marvel movie!

Fear of insects, mainly spiders, is considered one of the most common insect phobias. However, to date, no conducted studies have examined the effects of phobic stimuli exposure (spiders/ants) within the positive context of Marvel superheroes movies, such as “Spiderman” or “Antman”. A convenience sample of 424 participants divided into four groups watched different clips. Two intervention groups (Spiderman/Antman) and two control groups (Marvel opening/natural scene) were measured twice (pre-post intervention). The measures comprised an online survey assessing socio-demographic variables, familiarity with Marvel movies, comics and phobic symptoms. Reduction in phobic symptoms was significant in the Spiderman and Antman groups in comparison to the control groups. Seven second exposure to insect-specific stimuli within a positive context, reduces the level of phobic symptoms. Incorporating exposure to short scenes from Marvel Cinematic Universe within a therapeutic protocol for such phobias may be robustly efficacious and enhance cooperation and motivation by rendering the therapy as less stigmatic.

Unfortunately, they don’t tell us what specific clip they used, so I can spam it everywhere and teach people to appreciate spiders. I kind of doubt that it’s this one, at the 1:37 mark.

Also, it’s Spider-Man and Ant-Man, both hyphenated. I can’t imagine how that slipped past the editors. Additionally, since there is a new Spider-Man movie coming out in July, I’m hoping for a spider renaissance this summer.

University cracks down on predation in the lab, more like it

Predators object. David Adam has written an article about a policy change at Princeton University. I’m not too impressed with it.

Romantic relationships between university professors and their students are becoming less and less acceptable.

Hang on there, Mr Adam. When were they ever acceptable? Not in my day. They were always recognized as creepy. The terrible professor who slept around with his students has been a stock figure of contempt in literature and movies for a long time.

But OK, on with the specific news.

Many of the new university policies that have emerged in the last few years have focused on undergraduates and how to better protect them, typically with a campus-wide ban on staff dating undergrads. But a number of universities also demand that faculty members do not start relationships with graduate students they supervise. This month, Princeton University went further and declared that faculty members were no longer allowed to date any graduate student—even if the couple works in different departments. Pre-existing relationships are exempt from the new rule.

Announcing the policy after it was approved by a faculty vote on April 1, Dean of the Faculty Sanjeev Kulkarni said in an email to faculty members that the rule would “create a safe, respectful and equitable learning environment for everyone on campus.”

“I think it’s practical and I think it’s prudent,” Rebecca Burdine, an associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton who voted on the measure along with the rest of the faculty in attendance, tells The Scientist. Most importantly, she says, the graduate students asked for it, because faculty members often have huge power over a graduate student’s career and this can create an unequal and unhealthy power dynamic in personal relationships that emerge.

So, the group at the lower end of the power differential is asking for this behavior to end, making quite clear that this has never been about real love and partnerships.

And how does The Scientist title this article? Universities Crack Down on Love in the Lab. Well, that makes their bias crystal clear, anyway.

Then, of course, they have to include criticisms of the policy. The two men claim that there is no asymmetry of power and object to a decision that might shrink the dating pool. The one woman argues that it might mean a person in computer science might not be able to take a course in art history, because they’re dating an art history professor? What an odd concern.

Meanwhile, the people who are breathing a sigh of relief that one more pressure has been removed from their student career are not interviewed, and probably don’t want to be, because that might involve exposing the unpleasantness of some of the faculty they’re depending on to get the heck out of there.

Holy crap. The guy who thought prohibiting professors dating students would be too costly is…the Director of the Program on Ethics and Public Life at Cornell.

Dueling irrelevancies

What is Trump fretting over now?

On Tuesday, President Trump hosted Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in the Oval Office for a closed-door meeting, during which the leader of the free world spent an inordinate amount of time complaining about lost Twitter followers, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

There’s a big problem with Twitter right there — you know weird ol’ @jack really cares about keeping his buddy @realDonaldTrump happy, and @realDonaldTrump really cares about the big number of followers. So much so that this must sting:

Yep, 59.9 million vs 106 million. Don’t tell Donald that at least half his followers are hate-reading him.

Another summary of the Peterson/Žižek debate

This one is from the Guardian.

Peterson’s opening remarks were disappointing even for his fans in the audience. They were a vague and not particularly informed (by his own admission) reading of The Communist Manifesto. His comments on one of the greatest feats of human rhetoric were full of expressions like “You have to give the devil his due” and “This is a weird one” and “Almost all ideas are wrong”.

I’ve been a professor, so I know what it’s like to wake up with a class scheduled and no lecture prepared. It felt like that. He wandered between the Paleolithic period and small business management, appearing to know as little about the former as the latter. Watching him, I was amazed that anyone had ever taken him seriously enough to hate him.

Hang on there, bucko. I’m a professor, I’ve never experienced that. I always have an outline, at least, and a set of points I want students to understand, not that I can claim I’m always fully prepared to give an elegant, well-crafted lecture. I have a bit of anxiety about just showing up and babbling extemporaneously. I have no illusion that I’m good at it.

Peterson clearly has no such concerns.

He said things like “Marx thought the proletariat was good and the bourgeoisie was evil”. At one point, he made a claim that human hierarchies are not determined by power because that would be too unstable a system, and a few in the crowd tittered. That snapped him back into his skill set: self-defense. “The people who laugh might do it that way,” he replied. By the end of his half-hour he had not mentioned the word happiness once.

Žižek didn’t really address the matter at hand, either, preferring to relish his enmities. “Most of the attacks on me are from left-liberals,” he began, hoping that “they would be turning in their graves even if they were still alive”. His remarks were just as rambling as Peterson’s, veering from Trump and Sanders to Dostoevsky to the refugee crisis to the aesthetics of Nazism. If Peterson was an ill-prepared prof, Žižek was a columnist stitching together a bunch of 1,000-worders. He too finished his remarks with a critique of political correctness, which he described as the world of impotence that masks pure defeat.

I am not particularly fond of this assertion, though.

And they both agreed, could not have agreed more, that it was all the fault of the “academic left”. They seemed to believe that the “academic left”, whoever that might be, was some all-powerful cultural force rather than the impotent shrinking collection of irrelevances it is. If the academic left is all-powerful, they get to indulge in their victimization.

And that was the great irony of the debate: what it comes down to is that they believe they are the victims of a culture of victimization. They play the victim as much as their enemies. It’s all anyone can do at this point.

I am too powerful and influential and relevant! I am! <flails wildly, falls to knees> I am important!

Validate me! Please!

Thanks! And good news! But not enough good news.

I’m in a happy place right now, because a lot of you made donations directly to me to pay off the expenses for the Carrier lawsuit, and some of you made very large donations, and that meant I could finally cough up my share of the legal costs. I’m free! Our lawyer, Marc Randazza, is partly paid off! Thank you to everyone who contributed!

However, while that means I met my personal goal thanks to your help, we still have a ways to go. Skepticon, The Orbit, Lauren Lane, Amy Skiba, and Stephanie Zvan are still needing help — and Randazza still needs all of his fees covered — so the GoFundMe for the Defense against Carrier SLAPP Suit is still open and pining for more donations. And I’m not entirely free, because we have a mutual defense pact and none of us are totally off the hook until this account is closed.

We’ve reached one landmark, but we can’t rest until it’s all done. Donate to our defense fund, or donate to Skepticon, it’ll all help sweep this garbage lawsuit into the rubbish bin of history.

Oh, and hey, you’re all going to Skepticon, right? I’ve heard rumors of a spectacularly fun fund-raising event there, which I can’t tell you about, so you’ll have more opportunities to help us out there, if you can (Skepticon is a free event, so you shouldn’t feel obligated if you can’t afford it.) All the cool people will be there. Richard Carrier won’t.

It’s “Ask an Atheist Day”?

I guess it is. You can ask me anything, but there’s nothing in the rules that says I have to answer.

I probably won’t. I volunteered to help out with new student registration today, I’m going to be locked into working with students all day long, so most of the questions I’m going to be asked are along the lines of:

  • “Why is my class section full?”
  • “Am I actually going to have to take an 8am course? I don’t get up before noon.”
  • “I’d like to take 30 credits this semester & get it all over with. Why won’t you let me?”
  • “Prerequisites? What are those? I want to take that 4000 level course in Fancy Science right now!”
  • “Where’s the pre-med course?”
  • “Why do I have to take a history course? I’m going to be a doctor!”
  • “No one told me I’d need math to be a bio major! Why are you doing this to me?”
  • “I can’t get into that course I’ve been looking forward to? Why does the universe hate me?”

At least I can answer that last one as an atheist. The universe doesn’t hate you, it doesn’t care about you at all.

You may ask, “Why are you volunteering to do this? Aren’t you on sabbatical?” Especially since this is such a highly stressful day for the incoming students — it’s not registration day without at least one student breaking down and crying because they’re confused by all the information coming in, and all the decisions that have to be made. I’m doing it because these are students who will be starting up in the fall, and I have to return to the classroom in the fall, and I better make sure the new students are ready for me.

Another question: “Do I really have to return to my labors in the fall?” <breaks down weeping>

Yes. Because the universe hates me.

No more Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe has died. This annoys me, though.

Wolfe went on to write over 30 novels, with his best best-known work, The Book of The New Sun, spanning 1980-1983. The series is a tetralogy set in the Vancian Dying Earth subgenre, and follows the journey of Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers, after he is exiled for the sin of mercy. Over the course of the series the books won British Science Fiction, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Locus, Nebula, and Campbell Memorial Awards. In 1998 poll, the readers of Locus magazine considered the series as a single entry and ranked it third in a poll of fantasy novels published before 1990, following only The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.

Every few years, I pick up and reread The Book of The New Sun, because it is amazingly well-written, subtle, clever, and deep. Wolfe was a phenomenal writer, while Tolkien was a plodder who tapped into a well of mythology and told fairy tales. It is a tragic injustice that Wolfe was ranked third after that guy.

Also, if you thought Lord of the Rings was going to be tough to turn into a movie, Severian’s story is even more impossible, so Wolfe isn’t going to get a post-mortem surge in popularity after translation to a new medium. No one is cosplaying his characters. I wouldn’t say there’s no slash fiction about them, Rule 34 and all that, but moral ambiguity and unreliable narrators aren’t easily dragged into simplistic storytelling.

The conspiracy theorists were looking in the wrong place

All those claims of a pedophile ring in the imaginary basement of a pizza place…psssht. False flag. Distraction. All that stuff. Instead, they should have gone digging into the backgrounds of billionaires and people closely connected to Donald Trump. Clots of filth keep tumbling out of the pipeline connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein is struggling to recover the reputation he had in his glory days.

In the early Aughts, Epstein was known to rub elbows with the likes of Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey. His enigmatic rise from Dalton physics teacher to “international moneyman of mystery” who palled around with Prince Andrew and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was chronicled by the tabloids and New York magazine and Vanity Fair, which in 2003 reported, “Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women—lots of them, mostly young.”

I wouldn’t be particularly gratified to have rubbed elbows with that quartet. But being a registered sex offender now damages his ego, so he’s been flinging out millions of dollars in charitable donations through a newly labeled company, Gratitude America Ltd. I suspect one reason for laundering the money through this company is because the recipients of his largesse would love to have some of his money, but at the same time they’d rather not be caught rubbing slimy elbows with Epstein.

So Epstein has been filtering money to Larry Summers, Harvard, Deepak Chopra, a cancer research institute, Elton John’s AIDS foundation, various art philanthropies, etc., etc., etc. All this is claimed in tax filings by Gratitude America. But then it gets confusing…

The Daily Beast left messages for all the schools and charities that Epstein’s group listed as beneficiaries. Some representatives said they didn’t know who operated Gratitude America Ltd. Others said they never received any such donations.

In an email, Howard Straus, president of the Cancer Research Wellness Institute, said his group has “NEVER received a donation of that magnitude from ANYONE.”

“I would know,” Straus continued. “We are perennially short of funds, and would love to be the recipient of such largesse, but not from sexual predators.”

Jennifer Park of New York Concert Artists said her group never received a donation from Gratitude America. “I am sorry but you have completely wrong information,” she said in an email, adding that her nonprofit was perhaps confused with another group.

Well, cool. Shady stuff is going on. Someone ought to investigate.

In other news, another victim has stepped forward to testify against Epstein and his cronies. Maria Farmer was an employee of Epstein’s, and witnessed the young girls trooping off to his bedroom, and her own sister was molested by Epstein. There are also claims that Alan Dershowitz was actively involved in the rape romps.

“To my knowledge, I was the first person to report Maxwell and Epstein to the FBI. It took a significant amount of bravery for me to make that call because I knew how incredibly powerful and influential both Epstein and Maxwell were, particularly in the art community,’’ she wrote.

Farmer’s affidavit is one of 15 exhibits attached to a defamation complaint filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Epstein’s victims, against Alan Dershowitz, one of Epstein’s most vocal and powerful attorneys.

Giuffre claims in the lawsuit, as she has in past court filings, that Dershowitz, 80, knew about and participated in a sex-trafficking operation involving underage girls and run by Epstein and Maxwell, and that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz and other prominent, wealthy men when she was underage.

I don’t know what Epstein thinks he’s going to accomplish with multiple large donations (maybe) given semi-anonymously. It’s all just confirming to me that anyone with billions of dollars in their pocket is a dishonest sleaze, and we should be working to take their money away.

It’s not as if they actually earned it, you know. No one earns a billion dollars.