Woodstock it wasn’t

Wow. The Fyre Festival didn’t look at all interesting to me, but it seems to have suckered a lot of people. It was a music festival with only one band I’d ever heard of, and all the advertising seems to have revolved around photos of young women in bikinis. “The unparalleled best in music, cuisine, design & hospitality on a private island in the Exumas”, they said. And then…

Fyre Festival set out to provide a once-in-a-lifetime musical experience on the Islands of the Exumas.

Due to circumstances out of our control, the physical infrastructure was not in place on time and we are unable to fulfill on that vision safely and enjoyably for our guests. At this time, we are working tirelessly to get flights scheduled and get everyone off of Great Exuma and home safely as quickly as we can. We ask that guests currently on-island do not make their own arrangements to get to the airport as we are coordinating those plans. We are working to place everyone on complimentary charters back to Miami today; this process has commenced and the safety and comfort of our guests is our top priority.

The festival is being postponed until we can further assess if and when we are able to create the high- quality experience we envisioned.

We ask for everyone’s patience and cooperation during this difficult time as we work as quickly and safely as we can to remedy this unforeseeable situation. We will continue to provide regular updates via email to our guests and via our official social media channels as they become available.

The Fyre Festival team did become accomplished masters of understatement, though.

Blink 182 cancelled, because they’d never been paid. Which is strange, because tickets were exorbitantly priced.

Festival-goers paid anywhere from $450 for a no-frills day pass to up to $250,000 for the full VIP experience. One widely-advertised festival package cost $12,000. There were even packages that included a private yacht.

That’s a whole different world, there. People paid thousands of dollars to fly to a desert island in the Bahamas for a weekend of luxury. I’m straining to pay a few hundred dollars to visit Cincinnati for a science conference. Really, don’t go into teaching or science if you want to get rich.

But at least I didn’t get robbed. The Festival turned out to be soggy disaster tents, squares of cheese on plain bread, no music, and evacuation flights. It does provide a rich mine of schadenfreude, though.

Luxury! Music! Cuisine! Hospitality!

The Right Wing Lie Machine

Heidi Czerwiec dared to complain about ROTC carrying out unannounced military exercises on the University of North Dakota campus — I sympathize completely. There were a few times when I was at Temple University that I’d sleepily arrive on campus early in the morning and suddenly be surrounded by men in buzzcuts and fatigues waving rifles around, and no, it wasn’t a pleasant shock. We don’t seem to have a ROTC program here at UMM, fortunately.

But Czerwiec was reasonably concerned and later quite angry when she looked out her office window to see men in camouflage gear with guns, and she complained loudly to the ROTC officer in charge — you do not spring these kinds of activities on people without warning in this era of “active shooters” and mass murder at schools. It was irresponsible and unethical. Maybe the ROTC ought to carry out their exercises elsewhere?

And then right-wing radio and news sites got the story.

They play her up as one of those liberals, unpatriotic and hatin’ on the military, wanting to take away your guns. It turned into a frenzy of ignorant hatred.

Out of the 500 or so emails I receive (not counting voicemail and Facebook messages), most are hatemail, most calling for my job.

Nearly all the hatemail (98%) is from men.

Most of the hatemail accuses me of one or more of the following: being anti-military, anti-gun, and liberal:

And then she quotes a series of emails. They are so, so familiar. I’ve seen similar responses, in similar floods of right-wing hate. She’s a woman, so she also gets lots of dismissive insults about her appearance, her genitals, her “fuckability”. I wish I could say I’m safe from those, but nope — I get similar comments, and a common insult is to suggest that I’m a woman, so they can recycle their misogynist cliches against me, too. They can’t even criticize a man without letting their contempt for women ooze through.

What always strikes me is how unoriginal the haters are, how much their language is one of primal grunts and unthinking rote recitals of the same old stupidity and prejudice. Even when they can string together a proper and grammatical English sentence, the sentiments are the same crude bigoted knee-jerk execrations — it’s the difference between a turd and a lovingly sculpted turd.

It was a disconcerting article to read, bringing back unpleasant memories of past deluges of yahoos hating on me that I’ve received. But then I open my inbox and see that this morning I’ve only received two hate mails that got past my filters today, and only one of them wanted me to die horribly, and even he was willing to wait for me to passively die of cancer without actively causing my demise, so I’m feeling like maybe this will be a good day, relatively.

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.