Stormtrooping while female and brown

You would think this would be a dream come true for internet Nazis: a vidya game where you get to play as a Space Nazi in the Star Wars universe. I’m imagining, though, the shock they felt when watching this preview, and tough stormtrooper dressed all in black takes off their helmet, and big reveal…

The Stormtrooper Special Forces warrior is female! Aaaaaieeee! The dream is ruined!

Really, I’m not making this up. Some Nazi youth are horrified, and not just that the protagonist is female, but has brown skin.

It’s a SFF universe with magic powers thrown in, where spaceships have dogfights like WWI Sopwith Camels, and they’re concerned that including a woman is unrealistic.

Please. If you’re one of the people making that incredibly stupid argument that it isn’t canon, or that women all have teeny-tiny muscles, or that an alien race from long, long ago and far away would all be lightly pigmented, put away your video game controller, turn off your computer/console, and leave the basement. You have to learn about reality for a while.

Good noise

I often like to have a little background noise while I’m working — sometimes I’ll turn on the TV, even if I’m not paying attention to it, or have the radio on with headphones. It’s paradoxical how our brains work, that total silence can disrupt our concentration. I suspect that part of it is because in a silent room we become more attentive to inevitable rare small sounds.

I have now found the best background sound ever: “10 hours video of Arctic ambience with frozen ocean, ice cracking, snow falling, icebreaker idling and distant howling wind sound. Natural white noise sounds generated by the wind and snow falling, combined with deep low frequencies with delta waves from the powerful icebreaker idling engines”.

Oooh, soothing. Got a nice beat, I think I can get some work done to that.

Double-reverse brilliance

I am about to revolutionize the academic experience, which is afflicted with endless committee meetings, inspired by this comic:

I’m switching it around. No more meetings wrecking my days. Instead, all committee meetings are to be immediately replaced with “drinks”.

The only problem is that some days I have so many meetings I might suffer from alcohol poisoning.

Mike Cernovich is getting his moment in the sun

And he deserves every glittering sunbeam. This is Cernovich.

He got to appear on 60 Minutes, which has led to more media exposure.

Cernovich’s allegiance to the “alt-right,” a self-descriptor for a faction of the white nationalist movement, has been repeatedly documented. In 2015 he explained, “I went from libertarian to alt-right after realizing tolerance only went one way and diversity is code for white genocide.” Additionally, in a series of since-deleted tweets, Cernovich declared that “white genocide is real” and “white genocide will sweep up the [social justice warriors].” Cernovich also traffics in sexist rhetoric, having claimed that “date rape does not exist” and “misogyny gets you laid” and said that people who “love black women” should “slut shame them” to keep them from getting AIDS.

Cernovich has also helped popularize numerous conspiracy theories, including the “Pizzagate” story that claimed an underground child sex trafficking ring was run out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor and involved top Democratic officials. Despite widespread debunking, Cernovich recently claimed that the restaurant was a place “where a lot of pedophiles meet.” He often uses conspiracy theories to weaponize his social media following against his critics, such as when he baseless claimed satirical video editor Vic Berger was a pedophile after Berger published videos mocking Cernovich.

That’s not all.

The New York Times recently published an article answering the question “Who is Mike Cernovich?”; the cliff notes version of the answer is simply: he is a bad guy. For anyone willing to look for evidence, it isn’t hard to find; Cernovich’s lies are all readily accessible on his own social media, not to mention a documented fact from both conservative and liberal sources alike.

I’ve also been targeted by the lies of Cernovich. My crime: I pointed out that he was completely wrong about HIV when he claimed If you’re a straight man, you will not get HIV.

So he accused me of raping a student. No, he didn’t just accuse me: he made up the detailed and totally imaginary testimony of the student confronting me.

Using psychodramatic techniques, I will tell the story of PZ Myers’ alleged rape victim, as best as I can. (I have not spoken to the alleged victim. Rather, I am imagining and channeling what she might have felt, said, and experienced.) TRIGGER WARNING: This will be very disturbing.

He’s a fucking lawyer. He included this confession that he was openly lying to provide an excuse if he was sued (I obviously wasn’t claiming that he had actually done this, your honor), but no one is fooled. He’s a liar.

I guess if you lie big enough you get an episode of 60 Minutes and a mob of fascist defenders as a reward.

But what about the Smug Points?

Interesting. An analysis of the results of that Ivy League college vs. the state land-grant college shows no difference.

These researchers tracked two groups of students—one that attended college in the 1970s and another in the early 1990s. They wanted know: Did students attending the most elite colleges earn more in their 30s, 40s, and 50s than students with similar SAT scores, who were rejected from those elite colleges? The short answer was no. Or, in the author’s language, the difference between the students who went to super-selective schools and the students with similar SAT scores who were rejected from those schools and went to less selective institutions was “indistinguishable from zero.”

What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for many students, “who you are” as an 18-year-old is more important than “where you go.” After correcting for a student’s pre-existing talent, ambition, and habits, it’s hard to show that highly selective colleges add much earning power, even with their vaunted professors, professional networks, and signaling. If you’re one of the roughly 50,000-100,000 students who is sweating a decision from one of these tony schools, you’re focused on the wrong thing. The decision of a group of people you’ve never met isn’t as important as the sum of the decisions, habits, and relationships you’ve built up to this point in your young life.

Or, to put it in less encouraging terms, college isn’t a vehicle for upward mobility. There is an important exception, though.

For the elite colleges themselves, the Dale-Krueger paper had an additional, fascinating finding. The researchers found that the most selective schools really do make an extraordinary difference in life earnings for “black and Hispanic students” and “students who had parents with an average of less than 16 years of schooling.”

In other words, getting into Princeton if your parents went to Princeton? Fine, although not a game-changer. But getting into Princeton if your parents both left community college after a year? That could be game-changing. There are several potential explanations, but I’m most persuaded by one that Dale and Krueger put in their conclusions section. Minority students from less-educated families are more likely to rely on colleges to provide the internship and job networks that come automatically from living in a rich neighborhood with wealthy parents.

As the article points out, though, the students who would benefit most are the least likely to get in — the big name colleges have an interest in perpetuating the status quo and protecting the social hierarchy, so through mechanisms like “legacy” admissions (jeez, but I hate “legacies” — I saw too many brilliant undergrads fail to get into med school while their less competent, lazy peers sailed in on their parents’ status) they police who is admitted.

Anyway, I’m at a state university — apply to the University of Minnesota and specifically Morris! Our new motto will be “We’re not worse than Harvard.”