He finally crossed a line: Maher finally sneered at something white men like, and the outrage has started to bubble to the surface. How dare he criticize Stan Lee and comic books?

That he’s an anti-vaxxer, that his whole smug schtick is to salt his panels with a couple of assholes and fan the flames…nah, that doesn’t matter. He can keep on inviting Jack Kingston, Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, and all the other people he loves because they’re famous, all fine. That he’s a not very funny talk show host who was never in the running for any of the big broadcast late night shows, even with their relatively low standards of humor, tells you he’s kind of a flop who ought, at best, to be running an unexceptional podcast with a declining audience, instead of getting his blah words highlighted on Raw Story as if they’re news every goddamn weekend.

I thought it was good that he fought back, briefly, against the bizarre popular notion that terrorists are cowards who hate freedom, but those glory days are done. Retire, Maher.

Good. Here’s another article exposing the facile shallowness of the “debate me” crowd.

A famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language — of all the endless combinations of words in all of history — “debate me” is the most badass.

Or that’s what a cohort of online dudes appear to believe. The way a drunk roughneck might square up to you for a fight in a seedy roadhouse, the “debate me” dude pops into your Twitter mentions to demand a formal argument. Ignoring that people debate shit on the internet as automatically as one might breathe or blink, he is oddly constrained by the notion that disagreement has rules, or at least a chivalrous code of honor befitting a pistol duel in the countryside. Simply tussling over this or that question is beneath him. Debate, meanwhile, is a gentleman’s contract, holy ground, a noble anachronism.

I also appreciate the categorization of two kinds of debates: the ones where it’s solely an appeal to emotion (ironically, most of the online objective reality gang’s outcomes rely entirely on emotion — see Ben Shapiro for on-point examples), and the ones that rely on formal technicalities.

Besides, it’s not as if the lad insistent on a volley of conflicting ideas is willing to be convinced by his rival. He wouldn’t be doing this if he weren’t assured a victory, and so the provocation signals the egoist’s pride — as well as the almost charmingly naive certainty that competing ideologies can be vanquished by scoring enough points in a virtual joust. Of the two main models for American debate — political and extracurricular — he favors the airless academicism of the high school debate club, where he first learned some of his favorite fallacies: straw man, ad hominem, the appeal to authority. Whereas a presidential debate is decided on the intangibles, with voters swayed by gut reaction, the after-school debates play out in the technicalities, with naturally quarrelsome young men learning to fetishize what they consider their powers of logic and deduction. If they do well, they may conclude that others lack such faculties. Indeed, the “debate me” dude often behaves as if he’s the last “rational” person on Earth.

Ultimately, that’s the problem with debate: it turns discussion into a contest that requires some method of tallying up “points” to determine who “wins”, and the methods never rest on substance. Shouldn’t there be the equivalent of a TKO when someone lies or misinterprets a source, or doesn’t provide verifiable evidence, or just yells a conclusion? There are an awful lot of creationists and Republicans who’d be lying flat on the mat immediately after the opening bell, so no, those will never be criteria for success.

The last two years have coarsened me. I read this story of the demise of a chimpanzee leader, and realized I’ve changed.

Chimps have been spotted killing and then eating their former tyrannical leader.

Jill Pruetz, an professor of anthropology, said that she found it “very difficult and quite gruesome to watch” the group of chimpanzees kill a member of their own community and then abuse the animal’s dead body.

Professor Pruetz has described how she saw a group of the animals discover the body of a chimp called Foudouko, a former leader of the Fongoli community who had since been exiled for five years and who was probably killed by members of the group. After they came across the dead body, they abused and ate it for nearly four hours, the Iowa State University anthropologist described.

Once I would have been horrified and thought this was a terrible, awful act.

Now I’m thinking, well, maybe this was a reasonable response. Perhaps this is simply a normal group of young chimps reacting appropriately. Maybe this is how state funerals ought to be conducted in the future.

Both sides. Both sides on this issue would have good people.

(Warning: there is video at the link.)

We went out to celebrate. Jumbo Margarita Texana!

Shelebration complete. Shtaggered home. Feelin’ fine.

Ish all good. Really good. Nap time!

The Carrier lawsuit has been DISMISSED by the court. Finally! It is time to DANCE!

You know how Turning Point USA has a McCarthyite list of academics they don’t like, and also publishes the salaries of those faculty? I guess it’s to make citizens outraged at how much money they’re paying to support radicals in the ivory tower. Just to put it all in perspective, though:

Those football coaches are probably more conservative than the professors, though, so that makes it all OK.

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I thought about it some more. It’s not going to work. There are 1½ million professors in the US. If some filthy rich multibillionaire decided to try and influence us all by sinking a billion dollars into bribing us that would only be $666 each, in a one-time investment in one year.

Suddenly it all makes sense. Far cheaper to buy a few influencers, give them a prop fake university — a Prager U or some right wing think tank — and get them to spend all their time promoting pseudo-intellectualism to the rubes. In case you were wondering what the Intellectual Dark Web is actually all about.

There are underwater microphones installed around San Juan Island, and they are streaming live continuously to the internet. It’s called OrcaSound, and it’s supposed to be about hearing whale songs, but I’ve been listening for the last hour and all I hear are boat engines. It’s soothing, actually: a kind of continuous rumble, with a rhythmic throb. One boat just went by that has a weird syncopated rattle, and it slowly rises as it gets closer and fades as it passes by. And just now a second engine has joined the chorus — it sounds like sawing wood. If you like percussion and a good background drone, check it out.

I’d probably be startled out of my zen state if a whale started singing.

Also, one has to wonder whether the orcas are fans of all the noise pollution in their neighborhood since the apes started flopping around in their ocean.

Uh-oh. It’s getting intense right now. Gotta zone out.

Her daughter has written about Maureen Brian’s funeral, making me sad all over again. She was a wonderful person, for those of you who recall her participation online.